Worms Armageddon

Back in the late 90s, my buddy Dave handed me a CD-ROM that effectively ruined my sleep schedule. If you ever wasted hours on the DOS shareware classic Scorched Earth, you know the basic pitch here, but Team17 turned the dial up until the knob snapped off. You command a squad of heavily armed worms, you take turns trading shots, and you try to wipe the other team off the map before they do the same to you. It sounds simple, but the depth is wild.

Gameplay This is where the magic happens. You name your worms (mine were all 80s wrestlers, naturally) and drop them into randomly generated dirt maps. You have to account for wind, trajectory, and the fact that the terrain blows up chunk by chunk, completely changing the battlefield. I stayed up until 3am on multiple occasions just doing the training missions, mostly because I refused to let the ninja rope beat me. It is a brutal physics puzzle masquerading as a party game.

The arsenal is what makes it legendary. You have standard bazookas and grenades, but then you have the insane stuff. There is a sheep that walks into people and explodes. There is a banana bomb that fragments into smaller, deadlier bananas. There is the Holy Hand Grenade, complete with the Monty Python audio cue, which still makes me lose it every time I hear it. I accidentally dropped a Concrete Donkey on Dave’s squad once, and the sheer devastation was so unfair we had to take a break.

Hot seat multiplayer is the true star. Crowding around a CRT, passing the mouse back and forth, trying to plot the perfect arc, there is nothing else like it. The N64 had the party game market cornered at the time, but Worms held its own on the PC desk. My friend Benjamin beat me twice in a row once, and I am still not over it.

Graphics & Sound This ran flawlessly on my Pentium II back in the day, and it still looks fantastic on a CRT. The 2D visuals are crisp and clean, which is vital when you are trying to line up a pixel-perfect shot. It avoids the muddy textures that plagued a lot of early 3D games of that era. The sound design is iconic. The worms react to everything with hilarious voice clips, and you can customize the voice packs. I always rolled with the “Angry Scots” pack. Hearing a tiny worm scream in a thick Scottish accent right before he blows himself up with a misplaced dynamite stick never gets old.