EmP's Worms (XLA) review

Nice review. I'm a huge Worms fan, did you know?

...Worms Armageddon is awesome. I honestly don't think I could go back and play the original if its as short on the weapons and things as the newer version, simply because I'm so used to it. I suppose we could argue which one adds more strategic value - having more or less ways to blow people up - but I'll save that for another day. However, I'm glad you didn't lump Armageddon in with the sell-outs and "add-on packs". Truth be told, this one, Worms: Armageddon and Worms: World Party are the only games in this series that I've heard of. Heh.

Maybe I'm doing that one next. Do you know? I don't! I'm wonderfully unpredictable.

I've not read True's review, but if he suggests the original had the holy hand greande, he's plain wrong. Oh, True; you and you factual instabilty. For the record, while I remain a fan of World Party especially, the overkill weapons took a lot of the thought out of the game. A clever darkside could be effortlessly nuked with a concrete donkey drop and some weapons were simple click here, kill that whihc you couldn't defend against. A lot of games of WWW depended less on skill, and more on who got lucky with the ammo crates.

Well, I don't really know about World Party (I've just heard of it, not played it), but if it's anything like Armageddon, I never had an issue with the ammo crates thing. The thing is, a lot of the "overkill" weapons were only available through those crates (provided you had the appropriate settings for that... You could 'cheat' if you wanted, but that's just dumb). Crates only ever pop up every few turns, and they're completely random and in random locations, so I found that, while playing, it was fairly balanced. I mean, even if I could reach one before and enemy did or either one of us blew it up on accident (or deliberately), it could be completely useless. So basically I found myself relying on more of the conventional weapons like the shotgun, bazooka and grenade despite the potential for mass destruction.

I will agree about some of their uses, though. Like homing pigeons (one of my favorites) all you had to do was click where you wanted it to go then shoot it. At least with homing missiles you had to consider wind and distance (or at least distance... wind wouldn't make sense for a homing device). Of course, the latter did about half as much damage, too, so I owuldn't call it overkill.

EDIT: I realize that all my admittance to not playing many of the games in this series undermines my "huge Worms fan" claim, but I promise you, Armageddon has influenced me so much, that I'd happily try any of these others, whether I've heard about them or not, provided they're on par with what I've experienced. (And it sounds like they are.) Doubt I'd want to try all the stupid spin offs, though.