Earthworm Jim
Originally released on: Sega Megadrive (followed closely by SNES and then a myriad of other platforms)
Played on: SNES
Release date: 1994
I was looking forward to playing Earthworm Jim, as everyone maintains that it's an absolutely fabulous game, and I have very little memory of playing it before. "It's a 16-Bit platformer," I thought, "I'll absolutely love it."
Well, I didn't.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun to an extent, the graphics are very pretty and the whole thing feels like a cross between Disney's Aladdin (the video game, obviously) and Donkey Kong Country. It's got those graphics where they've tried to make characters, objects and scenery look semi-3D, and it feels like it's going to be a good game as you start it up.
Then some minor niggles start to arise. Firstly, the collision detection is slightly weird. One of the most common enemies are crows flying at you, but I kept finding that whenever the crow was on a level with me, flying at me, if I fired my gun in a straight line it... wouldn't hit the crow. If the crow was above me, shooting up would hit him, but strangely it just didn't seem to work consistently on the horizontal plane. Secondly, there are some control issues. Jim is supposed to have a secondary jump where his worm head spins around like a helicopter blade, and this is supposed to be activated by pressing the jump button while already in the air. And it is sometimes activated like this, but also, sometimes not, depending on the mood of the game. And finally? The semi-3D nature of the graphics as I described earlier, make it very hard to tell what is a platform, what is background scenery and what is a hazard (spikes etc.), which makes it a very frustrating game.
It's hard, too. On the first level (New Junk City) I made it to what I thought was the boss twice, before losing all my lives and having to start again. After then going through the games options menu and discovering an easier difficulty mode, (yes, I'm a wuss), I tried again, and managed to defeat that boss, only to discover it was a mid-level boss, and that I had the rest of the level to go! I did manage that, and eventually complete the first level, the between-levels-level (where you pilot Jim through space, racing Psy-Crow), the battle with Psy-Crow (which you get to if you lose the race, which I did) and then I got to level 2. And the problems got worse.
All the problems I already described were still in evidence, but the sticking point for me? It was the fact that mid-way through the level, I reached an area of the game that I seemed not to be able to get out of. There were multiple routes, multiple platforms, but wherever I went, I ended up in the same place over and over and over again. And that was a game-breaker for me I'm afraid.
Maybe I've been spoilt by obviously linear platformers in my life, but this bad level design was a huge problem for me. Discovering a hard jump, or a difficult enemy, or something else in a game that you have to work at to proceed doesn't bother me. But getting completely lost and stuck in a circular bit of level design does. So this was the second game in the playthrough that sadly, I finished playing before my hour was up.
It sounds like I'm being overly hard on Earthworm Jim, and I did enjoy some of my time with it in spite of the niggles. But the brick wall of awkward level design means that I'm not likely to put any time into it in the future.
Rating: 4.5/10
Time Played: 45 minutes
Would I play it again? It's unlikely. The frustrations definitely outweigh the fun, so I'm doubtful that I'll want to get into that again.
Next time? We're sticking with 16-bit 2D platformers for one of my favourite games of all time - what is it? Wait and see....
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