Worms DC

Title           Worms: The Director's Cut
Publisher       Team 17/Ocean (1996)
Game Type       Miscellaneous
Players         1-4
HD Installable  Yes
Compatability   AGA Amigas only
Demo            Hmm, try old magazine coverdisks or the original Worms demo
Game data/utils Scores of levels, DIY landscapes and sample sets on aminet
                Worms:DC official patch & update direct from Team17 only.
Submission      Dennis Smith Profiled Reviewer

Review
Worms was a mind-bogglingly successful 'Artillery' game which originated on
the Amiga, one of the last really great computer games to have been
produced by that now-extinct species, the bedroom programmer, that shy
creature responsible for many of the great games of the eighties. In
Worms, you controlled a team of four worms and their fearsome arsenal in a
turn-based physics-fest of angles and initial velocities in order to
annihilate your opponents. It was the phenomenon that made it socially
acceptable to tell people you had Worms.

The Director's Cut adds lots of bits and pieces but the gameplay is
essentially the same. With your AGA chipset, you can bump that beautifully
scrolling multi-level landscape up from 8 to 16 colours and it makes a big
difference. There are loads of new weapons to play with - the sheep is now
a standard weapon, and there are numerous new super-weapons, from the old
woman to the sheep-on-a-rope - and there are lots of new options to alter
the behaviour of various aspects, from the distance from worms at which
mines detonate to the actual damage done by all the weapons.

There are new landscapes, landscapes now have both a foreground and a
background, and you can actually create new landscape types by defining the
repeating units and ornaments that a landscape is created from (an idea I
put to Andy (the author) not long after 'Worms' was released; I like to
believe that I'm at least partially responsible for this innovation :) ).
On top of that there's the graffiti mode in which you can define the
outlines of the landscape by drawing on the screen (so you can write your
name or draw your perfect landscape in a matter of seconds). There's been a
generally fine-tuning of other features, and the ninja-rope can now be used
repeatedly in a spider-man kind of way - though your attempts to impress
your mates with such a move often result in novel ways of amusing your
mates by dying in a spectacularly silly way. Many of the weapons can now
have a sound-effect randomly chosen from a small selection of samples, and
the sounds are now stored in fast memory for more efficient memory usage.

In short, there's a lot more to Worms:DC but not enough to make it a sequel
(hence it was referred to as Worms '1.5' before release). If you already
have Worms, you'll wonder why you should buy this. Well, it depends. You
might be able to flog your old Worms to someone else. In my opinion, it's
straining things just a little bit at twenty quid, but nowadays you'll
almost certainly get it for less than that, and as such, I believe, it's
well worth it. If you haven't already got Worms - what are you waiting for?

Alphabetical list.