‘Worms’ or bust: Britain’s most tenacious indie games company | Hacker News Reader

‘Worms’ or bust: Britain’s most tenacious indie games company

arstechnica.com

129 pointsdoppp51 comments

I want to like the newer Worms games, but IMO the series peaked with Worms Armageddon in 1999. The physics in that game were perfect and all their attempts since then feel floaty and weird.

Thankfully T17 turned over the source code to some fans who renovated it to work on modern versions of Windows, and they're still running the master server for multiplayer 17 years after release!

WA saved a woefully boring junior year in college as me and my mates had epic worm offs. Love this game. Still play it.

The theme song from Armageddon is also perfect and brings back memories for me.

I remember and like armageddon - and remember world party being good too. I've wanted to try getting into a modern-er worms again, but for several years now, there have been so many different versions being sold simultaneously with so many different names, it's impossible to tell which is the "latest" or even most advanced (several being cut down for consoles and subsequently ported).

See e.g. the post world-party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series) with often several new, similarly named titles per year. It's impossible to know what to get, and the fact that several are usually being sold/on sale simultaneously just leads to confusion.

The latest worms game worth playing is probably Reloaded on PC. It's a little stripped down compared to Armageddon/World Party but it's the last worms game where the physics are spot on. After Revolution came out they've all been floaty and janky, grenades that would rather roll than bounce, ninja ropes that actually act like rope (and are therefore completely useless) and just general visual 'bleh' from the 2.5d.

A J2ME Java mobile port was played for many a hundred of hours by my mates and I at school. Replay value was absolutely insane.

Sometimes I feel those J2ME games were better than games today. I remember wasting hundreds of hours on worms and galaxy on fire and several others. I tried the new galaxy on fire in android and the game is just not good enough to keep me engrossed.

Perhaps your attention span/taste/expectations have changed since. I certainly had more fun with video games as a teenager than now, and I don't think it's necessarily due to an objective change in quality.

The J2ME phones had physical buttons, with real physical clickey sensation when you press them. That's a world of difference in gaming when compared to a touchscreen.

I'm sure of that. Some games you just can't play on a touchscreen, but you could on a 12-key keyboard (and vice-versa, to be fair).

Same, as well as other Fishlabs games (Blades & Magic etc) and plenty others from Gameloft et al. I remember being much more engrossed those times than I have ever been involved in post-touch mobile games, for Android and iOS. I wonder if there was an objective decline in quality (it certainly seems so with the pesky social integration and all consuming microtransactions), or if I simply am less easily taken in than before.

I was going to post something along these lines. This is one of thee few games I get downright emotional about.

> I want to like the newer Worms games, but IMO the series peaked with Worms Armageddon in 1999.

Heh, I never liked the Worms 2 style graphics, so for me the series peaked with Worms Director's Cut. One day I might dig up the countless WRM16 maps I made in Deluxe Paint: http://worms2d.info/Colour_map_(first_generation)

Am I the only person here who loves the iOS app? Agreed, on desktop Worms Armageddon is the top, but the iPad is just the perfect device for Worms in 2016.

Which one is "the" iOS app? They've got Worms 1-4, and more :)

Right on, that's important: 1-2 were terrible actually. 3-4 are up to par.

Did anyone ever try playing the original worms CDROM as an audio CD back in the day? The saga of Boggy B and Spadge, along with the full vocal version of the worms theme tune still brings a tear to my eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzBItajyEo

Back when the code was a couple of mb, and the "prerendered FMVs" (shoutouts to intel indeo) only took up a couple of hundred so you had to come up with something else to fill the disc.

Whoa! I had no idea there was a vocal version of the theme song. I heard that theme song probably thousands of times before, but never realised it had lyrics. Neat!

I remember this - I'd often try this with most CD-based games, PlayStation ones in particular used CD audio for game soundtracks.

Same trick with Quake. The soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor, so I consider it to be a 'secret' NIN album.

I similarly had no idea that there was a vocal version!

Trying to find the theme from the version I owned (Worms United - basically Worms + the Reinforcements expansion) led me to this: not only the theme, but the oh-so-very-old CG cutscenes from the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckbNvrM83A

The theme is still brilliant, but those cutscenes... oh deary me.

Some Looney Toons antics there.

Hey, Bjorn Lynne! One of the classic demoscene musicians --- known as Dr. Awesome. I have a tonne of his CDs.

...also, I see that someone has deleted his Wikipedia page. Sigh.

There is always his website: http://www.lynnemusic.com/

Hopefully, there is very mature open-source alternative called Hedgewars [1][2]. I found this game as very nice remake of Worms Armageddon / World Party with a multiplayer and better graphics and sounds effects.

[1] https://github.com/hedgewars/hw

[2] https://www.hedgewars.org/

No mention of 17 Bit / Team 17 is complete without mentioning they got their start by publishing a hugely successful disk magazine. Initially quite amateur but became a fairly slick presentation, and very popular. If memory serves a few of the magazines gave away their disks a time or two. Pretty much every UK Amiga owner knew of them from this.

Worms was also notable in that it was one of a very few decent games produced in BASIC - Blitz Basic. Not sure if other 17 Bit output was also Basic.

Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines.

I was a Blitz Basic programmer myself (still do a bit now and again). The other big Blitz Basic game was Skidmarks, a really cool isometric racing game from Acid Software. I used to carry my Amiga and TV set a few hundred yards to my friends house for multiplayer games over a null modem cable!

I was a huge fan of Alien Breed, Team17's first self-published release. It was a gauntlet style top-down shooter with an "Aliens" theme. Rico Holmes's pixel art was fantastic and it had great sound. I had to buy an extra 512k for my A500 for £25 in order to play it.

I think it was also one of the earliest games to have a pre-rendered animation sequence in the intro. It was made by Tobias Richter, who was well known on the Amiga scene for his 3d renders.

They did. The mag was probably started to promote the PD library - it'd include a few PD things each time. Seem to remember they'd put a scene demo, a game and an app or utility on every disk. They seemed to curate their PD collection and give good descriptions, rather than havng to buy on blind faith and a disk title.

The main PD competition, the Fred Fish disks were so very variable by comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VFOzKrv8RY Ahh man...Allister Brimble's themes man...so good.

Even the (relatively) recent remakes were quite good!

Blitz wasn't your grandfather's BASIC, though. Structs and pointers and inline asm, oh my.

Had all that in BBC BASIC, back in the day!

Really? I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC (Acorn Electron), and while I recall asm I don't remember it having structs or pointers.

Not structs, but it did have pointers, or at least the BBC Model B version of BBC BASIC did. '?a%' or 'a%?0' would let you read/write the byte pointed at by 'a%', for instance. In BBC BASIC V on the Archimedes, you also had '!' (i.e. '!a%' or 'a%!0'), which would allow you to read 32-bit words.

I missed you mentioning structs, though I do recall simulating structs with PROCs specifically for manipulating system data-structures, which was essential for WIMP programming on RISC OS, if you didn't want your code to be an unreadable mess. Assigning the offsets to variables helped with simulating structs too.

The ending is a little eyebrow-raising. Both founders are ousted, refuse to talk about it, and we get some pablum about how they are now a 'team' (rather implying that they epically weren't before). What was going on there in the 2000s?

Not sure about the team bits, but Worms in the 2000s was basically ultra-DLC before DLC even existed. Every 'new' game for a long time kept the vast majority of the old bits from the previous games, added a few new items, and charged full retail for the privilege.

You just described how sequels work...

A sequel implies some sort of continued story or major overhaul, not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age.

I refer you to almost the entire output of the 80s & 90s game scene.

Especially platformers.

cmaggard is being downvoted, but he's quite right. Playing Worms means repeated multiplayer matches on a handful of maps, with a couple dozen weapons that don't change. Sequels repeated most of the maps and weapons and added a few more, and these would indeed be small IAP or perhaps $5-10 DLC on Steam if made today. I think it's fair to say that the sequels were more derivative than the sequels of most other franchises since at least those franchises could add new campaigns (Worms added a campaign-esque experience at some point that was mainly a chain of single-player matches) or do significant graphics updates (which Worms could not meaningfully do since its cartoon graphics and physics were good enough early on in the series.)

> not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age. To make your point valid we have to completely ignore the lack of easy payment/DRM platforms like Steam to sell these "1.99 DLCs" we also have to ignore that 2d gaming in particular has been massively devalued since the 90s/00s because of the mobile game race to the bottom and steam sales.

This may be the best part about Ars expanding to UK, getting some proper coverage of what was going on Europe.

No mention of Scorched Earth in an article about Worms creators? Sounds like someone didn't do their research.

I never played worms, but I saw other people play it at the height of its popularity. After seeing it mentioned on HN today I was telling my SO about it, and compared it to scorched earth. Nice to see someone else making the comparison.

This was a well known comparison/argument at the time :)

I'm glad someone else mentioned Scorched Earth. My friends and I played this to death when we were young. I never got on the Worms bandwagon though as it just felt like an over-animated very of Scorched Earth.

Worms is obviously in the same genre but it does change quite a bit - most obviously the focus on moving your team members (SE is mostly about weapon selection and aiming, in worms each turn also includes a movement phase which is just as important as the other 2 elements).

This changes the gameplay quite a bit, especially in multiplayer (it become a lot less "chess-like" and more action-y, despite being a turn based game).

I rather liked the banana throwing gorillas game that came packaged with QBASIC

I don't think Scorched Earth was the first tank game, pretty sure I can recall playing simpler version (without choice of weapons) on early IBM compatibles. If worms owes something to Scorched Earth, it owes as much or more to Lemmings.

I'm glad the article mentions the lawsuit Team17 brought against Amiga Power, but could really gave gone into this in greater depth- this is a fascinating point in gaming history. It had a much bigger impact than effecting just one (admittedly large) Magazine.

Sad to see Martyn Brown kicked out, I still remember writing to him at 17-Bit Software as it was then to get maps for the game "Dungeon Master".

How the heck did they survive 3D? They should have sticked to 2D. There was even some 2D version made in 3D graphics, no?

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