Retronauts - 654: Worms

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Oi, nutter! Host Stuart Gipp, Dave Bulmer and Ben Paddon activate annelid analysis for Team 17’s long-running Worms series. You’ll regret that! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, David. Wiggly whimes, you just can catch them, you just can catch them, wiggily whimes. And thank you. Hello, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. That was probably the best intro that's ever going to be done for an episode that I can conceive of. Did I get it right? Like, I can't swear that's how it went. I think it goes Wiggly Worms. You just can't catch him. Wiggly worms. You just can't catch him. You just can't catch him. You just can't catch him. Wiggly worms. Should I do the whole thing?

There's like one of your favorite noises. It's like, it's a bit like a barump from Popeye and son. But it's not quite that. There is another lyric. There is another lyric that is like they're wiggly. They're jiggly, there something, something rhymes with jiggly. You just kind of fucking sweetly. Yeah. But I don't remember that bit, and I don't know anyone who does because it was so quick and kind of smushed together

that it was just kind of... Is it like one of those bits where it's like, Wiggly Worms, just can't catch him, da-da-la-da-da. And then it starts going like, on instrumental, and the guy's like, Wiggly Wurms, a new game from Milton Bradley. And it's just like, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you do? Get your worms out of the stupid fucking bucket.

I don't know. The other one that I remember from that same error is, Mr. Frusty is such a burn He makes treats for everyone That's the one that is kind of lodged Deep in my cerebellum Yeah I cannot be extracted without

I wanted a Mr. Frosty so badly And I bet it's awful I bet it's bad apparently We'll never not want one But apparently everyone who had one is like Yeah they were bad I don't want it anymore Yeah I have to go to the shops and buy

Slush puppy like a total sucker I hate it They did a slush puppy toy thing as well as I recall No Yeah And I bet like the cost of three slush puppies That probably get you a Mr. Frosty

Yeah, you're probably right actually Maybe the cost of how much they cost now For Mr Frosty probably costs like 65 quid now And there's probably like crypto involved in some way Frosty coins or something Anyway, this episode so far is really staying on the rails Which I love But the way I see it

Oh my God I hope so God I hope so Well here's the thing right We're talking about worms today I'm going to do an introduction to be in a sec But we're talking about worms Now, a video game, not like the disease, obviously, or the parasite.

The game, though, it is as addictive as a parasite. Compelling as a parasite? I don't know. It gets into your body. It controls your behaviour as much as the sort of parasite like those mushrooms that make ants do things. Yeah, off of The Last of Us, which is why this, you know, that's really, you know, that's why worms is quite similar to the Last of Us. Because it's a video game. Yeah, that's a bit more compelling reason, actually.

I wish I'd go on with that. Hi, I'm Stuart Jip, as you've probably determined by the contents of this episode so far. Let's find out who's here today to talk about worms, the hot artillery game that's sweeping the nation. Let's go with the brand new retronauts person today. Who's all the way over in, Sunny, I don't know where you are, actually? Oh, I'm in Los Angeles, California. Hello, my name is, yeah. I am Ben Padden, my pronouns are they, them.

people who are listening to Retronauts might remember me from Ports Centre, which is a YouTube show that I used to do where I talked about interesting and unique ports conversions and re-releases of video games. I'm also a podcaster. I'm just a human person. I have wants and needs, many of which are worms adjacent.

That's interesting, and I'll ask you about that later when we finish recording. And who else is here today, who you've already heard, doing an annoying. song, which I asked them to do, be fair. It's me again, Dave. I'm just I don't have wants and needs, and I'm just here in the basically

capacity of just being someone who both these people know. I don't know much about ones, but I have a very strong fondness for a couple of them and big old nostalgia, and I can talk about those ones. And I'm sure at Jep, and I have wants in these, but I've been advised by a jury of my peers not to reveal

them. Now, yes, just let lie. So yes, Worms, an exciting artillery-based video game, which I'm sure you've heard of. I want to say developed and published by Team 17 pretty much since the beginning. Almost exclusively, I mean, if you want me to get into the publishing history of the Worms series, I can absolutely get into it. This is the thing. We're lucky, we've got Ben here, because Ben is like the world's foremost expert on Worms, including out of anyone at Team 17. Yeah, it's only slightly embarrassing, and it's entirely unmonetizable.

Like, at least Larry Nemechek, Dr. Star Trek, has, like, podcasts and does, like, set tours and stuff like that. I can't monetize my, the brain worms that I have, pun tangentially intended. I can't, there's no way to monetize this, this knowledge that I have. And when I die, it will die with me. It's great. There must be. Write a book. There you go.

A book. A worm's book. Yeah. How the worms turned open brackets into a really good computer game, quite. close bracket. Parentheses. Wait, not parentheses. Colon, the history

of turn-based strategy from the Commodore Amiga to whatever the fuck we've got now. Forward by Matt Lucas for some reason. I don't know what he's doing. Because he looks a bit like one. He does look a bit like a worm sometimes.

I was thinking this the other day actually about how I would, you know, you see books that are like biographies of a subject. And they're always called something, something, colon the something something story

and that's when you think about it that's actually really funny to me I think it's funny because some of them are just like really ridiculous and over the top it's like a Mega Man like the Blue Bomber Colon how Capcom's diminutive shoot him up

forged the legacy in the net and beyond it's like why is that necessary paper isn't it like they've given you the real title of what actually the contents of this book is but then we have to put something pithy at the up, otherwise everything can dress up the fact that it's a book about Mega Man.

It's impossible. You can't make that academic. Well, you probably could. They have. Yeah, I probably should stop because I wrote a book, but it's got a four-word title and no parentheses whatsoever. So, yeah, that's how it's done. All the games are good, available now. Anyway,

yes, Worms. Well, how far are we in now, like 45 minutes? We were recording for about two and a half hours now, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, now, once, now what I've done here is as Dave was alluded to and by alluded to I mean stated outright I got Benin because I

used to love playing worms two and a little bit of Armageddon and quite a bit of the first one and sort of beyond that when the series kind of went sort of 3D I just sort of went no I don't think I will and I sort of ignored it after that

we're doing the odd bits but my knowledge of it was never sort of the history and such it was more just like I'm going to play worms with my friend now You know, we'll get into it exactly, but I think the best way to begin, I'm going to ask you first, Ben, is how did you come across this worms nonsense and what's your sort of general history with it, potted history with it? Pottered like a scar, we might find a worm in. Yeah, I, so I'm in the bafflingly unique position of knowing exactly what date I first played worms. It was January the 11th, 1996.

my dad my mom had thrown a surprise birthday party for my dad and a last ditch attempt to save their marriage which obviously rip-roaring success obvious to me in that it didn't happen but one of my dad's friends my dad had an amicam my dad had a bunch of amygues had like a 500 or 2,000 or 1200 and a CD 32 that was a cool dad yeah

my dad worked in IT and computing and he had a ton of stuff but um we had a ton of entirely illegally obtained Amiga games that my dad would download from BBSs and what have you and do disc copies and trade with his mates. Normal. Yeah.

Excopy Pro. Nobody bought an Amiga game ever, that's why it died. Yeah, that was kind of a huge, huge problem with it. But my dad's friend Larry bought him a physical copy of worms for his birthday. And

the night of his birthday, after everyone had gone home, me and him fired it up on his A-1200 my dad went into training mode aimed at a target tapped the space bar instead of holding it down for the amount of power that you wanted for the shot blew himself up

a worm called him stupid and we cackled for what felt like 17 solid minutes and from that moment I was lost in the source there was really no other way to discuss exactly yes most of those original

worms voices by the way were Andy Davidson himself. Oh, were they? Yeah, on the original. So that's how I first encountered it. My dad kind of would dip in and out of it, but like, I would come home from school and it would be the thing that I had to do. And so I played Worms on the Amigo.

A bunch, Worms the Directors Cut, came out in 97, and I think I got my copy in early 98. I found it on sale in an electronics boutique in the Luton-Andel Center for 15 pounds. Finding it on sale at all. It's pretty quite impressive. The little electronics boutique that was in the Luton Arndale Center had this kind of carousel

of just Amiga games in the middle of the store, like the last holdout of the Commodore Amiga at that time. And that's why I ended up getting copies of like got theme park and super skid marks and deluxe gloom and Worms the Director's Cut. And Worms the Directors Cut, being a game that I bought most of my own money,

I didn't have to borrow a fiver off my mum because I only had 10, has been kind of became my favourite Worms game that and Armageddon I still play the director's cut

I obviously still play Armageddon I was a little bit of information for fact for fans of incredibly tedious fact I was a consultant

on the anniversary edition of Worms Armageddon as well so that's my incredibly boring claim to fame anything that you're under a non-disclosure agreement that you'd be prepared to reveal

to just to sort of jeopardise your own I don't think there is really anything that I can't share anymore. I mean, I came in, here's the thing. I wasn't like yelling at people at digital clips. Change this line. It was like,

I came in very late in the day. They gave me a build of the game to play. I played it for a week. I gave them my thoughts. Here's what works. Here's what doesn't. Here's what I think are bugs. Here are what I hope are bugs, but if they're designed decisions, I understand why you made them. Yeah.

That's a sheep. It should not be there. And and they were able to take some of my notes. They were not able to take other notes. And again, the game came out, and it's more or less what I wanted it to be with a couple of minor exceptions.

We shall talk about that momentarily, but I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask Bulma. That's you, Dave. What's your one's initiation and subsequent experience? Okay. Well, firstly, I want to say that when I went, stupid, I bet that was pitch perfect. I reckon it was. It was. To the original sample.

I think due to some small distortion, like I said, it did sound a bit like Michael Jackson doing his noise. Yeah. Well, it's not. thousand miles away. Not that time, though. Not the time I said it in that just then. I mean the first time. The first one. Both of them are now found within the earth, so it's fine. I don't know offhand the date I first played Worms, but it has been revealed on my podcast, Sonic the Comic the Podcasts, if you're interested in finding out, that's actually true. Because I read my diary out and it was in it. I first came across Worms, the demo on a magazine.

What would that have been? Amiga format. Yeah, power. Was power around when one was a thing? Power was around. Power would not have had the demo because Team 17, the upper level people at Team 17

hated Amiga power. Did they? And even if they didn't, Stuart Campbell would have just been like, this is shit, I'm a massive turf now. That would just be like, yeah. That was actually what, did it? Yeah, no, I played that demo.

And there was like a little rattling and then, ding, it's like, a massive turf. now. Anyway, I played that demo, and it was, like, I think we all have moments like this throughout our lives where we play a game and we're like, oh, this is a new game. Like, I haven't, this isn't like, you know, what you're talking about. A lot of the time, you know, you would play, like, here's the latest platform that I've played, you know, it's another platformer. And then now and then they'll be like, oh, I've never, with the first day he played Lemmings. I've never played a game like this before. And it was mesmerizing. And I had such a good time.

And it was like, I think the demo had like two levels you could play. One was a normal one, and one was the Team 17 logo that you could stand on and blow up or something. And love that. So then I just saved up. And just before Christmas, I didn't ask for it. It was Christmas, but I didn't ask for it for Christmas, because I couldn't risk not getting it. I had to have it. So I saved up.

And we happened to have a little outing to Nottingham to see a musical version of, a Christmas carol, but not any of the ones you might have heard of, just one that was on at the Not Theatre Royal in Nottingham that particular week, and that may have been the extent of that version. And during it, I was just like reading the manual for worms, because on the way I'd nipped into whatever the shop was on the high street at the time, be it game, be it electronics boutique, be it interzone or whatever, like, whatever it was at the time, I got it and had a tremendous time reading the manual in the theatre waiting for the play to start and then went back home, completely obsessed over it.

Of course, the scenario that must have happened in many a home at the time where Dad came home from work, you know, put his briefcase down, said, hi, kids. We didn't have a dog, but if we did, it would have jumped up onto him into his arms, you know, to give him a lick, all of that. And I excitedly shouted, hello, Dad, we've got worms. and Dad was able to spin comedy out of that. Outstanding. And then Christmas Day, I enjoyed my Christmas and opened all my presents and then said, would anyone be offended if I just went and played worms

a thing that isn't a Christmas present? And that's what I did. Absolutely flipping loved worms and all further musings on that I can interject with as we talk about the game. Yes, yes, please do. I mean, for me it was, I didn't have the game. until I picked up Worms 2 on the, you know, the sold-out label, the 499. Because I didn't really get that many games at that time,

because I didn't really have a computer that could play them properly. It was like a family computer, you know. But I played it at Friends, and more so than actually playing the game, because I was very bad at it. I didn't really get, you know, wind resistance, the power you were supposed to shoot things at, what the weapons did, because my friends wouldn't tell me. I didn't know you could change the grenade bounciness or the fuse. I didn't know you could do that.

it was just all very difficult. But what I did like was the fact that you could create your own squad of Lemmings, Jesus Christ. That's surprisingly relevant, actually. You can create your own squad of Lemmings if you want, but that would be an entirely separate game. But you could create your own guys and then take them out. So it's like, right, okay, so I've got a team of my guys, and they're all my, they're

also individually named by me, and I can give them cool names. Yeah. And my guys are going to go and fight my friends guys, and whoever's the winner is. is obviously the best guys. Yeah. And so what I did instead of playing worms is I would just draw endless comics about my guys. Like, Worms, the comic,

like, Sonic the comic, except like just because you know how the reinforcements expansion, we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but the way that it added the sort of CGI cutscenes to the game that were mostly just a worm getting blown up by something. But in a vaguely amusing way. Yeah, like kind of,

a vaguely kind of Hanna-Berberra Merry melodies kind of way. I was just like, yeah, that's it. That's the one. So I would do all these comics in Byro that were just like that, like a vaguely amusing thing happens, no dialogue. And then I would do, um, this is very embarrassing, uh,

white dwarf style match reports of one's games that I had heard. Oh, wow. Oh, that's really spectacular. If I can find one of these, if I can find one of these comics, I'll get some pictures posted of it. So, uh, yeah, I can't remember which of you I've already talked to about this.

Uh, Ben, I bet when we used to stream and you would play worms sometimes on the stream. I bet I talk to you about this. Do you remember when I was about 15, I started writing, like, planning a worms fanfic and I was trying to get as much worms stuff in as I possibly

could. And I've never been able to find it. Well, I've found it. I don't think it would be good content for me to read that on the podcast. But like, rest of sure that I've found it. What I'll do is I'll read it to you at the end. And if any of it's interesting, then it can be edited in. But yes, I have found that.

So confirmed. I also used to be weirdly inspired by worms to make stories happen. I wonder what? It must be the worm's song, right? Well, the worm song, well, here's the thing. The worm's song has a narrative. I never, I did not experience the worm song because I had the amiga floppy disk version. I don't have the CD 32 version.

I had the PC version. So I did not experience the worm's song until actually, it's funny you should mention sold out, Stuart. I sold out Stuart being your fun nickname when you start hawking Mountain Dew on this podcast. But... I sold out a long time ago. Yeah. But the sold-out release of the original worms was really the first time I really got to experience the FMVs as part of the game.

They were included, now that I'm saying that, they were included on a CU Amiga covered CD-ROM, which came out Christmas of 96, which was actually intended to be an expansion for the at-the-time unreleased worms the director's cut that would add the FMV cutscenes and CD audio from the CD-32 release. They were on this disc that they gave way for free. Were they not on the director's cut game normally?

The director's cut was only released on floppy. So there was never a CD-32 version of the director's cut, and it never got released for any other systems. It just came on three floppy disk. And the intention was if you had this particular cover copy of the CU Amiga cover disc, you would have the CD audio, you would have the FMV sequences. But Andy ran out of time to implement the feature. so they are unusable in the game.

Oh, no. So my friend had that CD, and he brought it round, and that was how I heard the Worm Song in, what would that have been, 1996, would that have been? Christmas 96, yeah. And he had a CD drive on his Amiga, which was rare in and of itself. And so he brought this round,

and I was obsessed with it. I, you know, I taped it off his CD, but I got so obsessed with it that I went and bought that magazine. So I've got it now. I've still got the CD. It's up there in a cupboard right now. I can get it now.

I also have a copy. I have, a couple of years ago, I'd been lamenting the fact that I no longer had my boxed copy of Worms, the director's cut. And a friend of mine said, hey, what's your address? And he found it on eBay and had it shipped to me. And then later, I realized I want the CD-ROM, so I poured it off eBay. And the way that Team 17 boxes were in the 90s were, there was the sections for the floppy disc, and then there was a cut-out for a CD-ROM in case you had the CD-ROM version. So I have the discs in there, and then I have a CD-ROM in there. Lovely.

Okay, so where we're going to find out, we're going to be able to say we're going to be like, we'll say we're going to, where we're saying we're going. Okay, so where was we? Where Went was... Well, I was just going to finish off what I was saying a minute ago by saying I remember clearly that when I bought that magazine, it was as a single. What I was doing was I was putting down, you know, three to five pounds, the price of a CD single, to purchase the Worm Song as a CD single. And that was how I treated it, and that's what it is. And I've got that.

And, yeah. The Worm's song, I have no doubt that there'll be a cut of it in this podcast. Of course. It's like the music, but then there's like spoken... word stuff, isn't that? It's sort of, yeah, I've heard it before. It's a bit, um... Yeah, it's certain.

I can't remember now, whether it was for my podcast or what podcast it was, but I remember researching this and finding out who that guy is. And I want to say his name's David Bland. Is that the guy? Do you know this, Ben? Oh, the person who did the vocals for the original worm song? Yeah. There's an actual worm.

I don't know where... It was an actual, I mean, actual worm would make sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He's listed as the vocal narration on Moby Games entry for the Worm Song. David Bland. David Bland. It's a good name.

And he would have liked it. He also did the graphics for Wizz and Liz. Yeah, I was going to say, what? David Bland rules. This is the thing. Now and then you find out, like, this person had lots of different little fingers in different pies of your childhood. And it's like, yeah. This is now a David Bland Stan podcast, I love.

Yeah. He wrote the stories for Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories, Chinatown Wars and Liberty City stories. He did graphics for that Thomas the Tank Engine game that we streamed a thousand years ago. Alfred Chicken, last action hero, the Game Boy version of the 1994 Flintstones game based on the movie. This guy is anything but for.

This is incredible. We should get David Blan on here. What the hell? He has an IMDP. He has a LinkedIn. Okay, this might actually have to happen when I have to have a Blandcast. So, I think... He sits in that comfortable place where it's like he's done loads of things.

things we respect, but come on, we're going to be able to get him. Blandland. Don't insult David Bland on this podcast. It's not an insult. You got all of us. We're all in the same boat here. That is fair. You know what? You're right. It wasn't an insult. It was, if anything, praised that David Bland has not become an egomaniac.

Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. And remained refreshingly accessible. I can imagine if just by like a weird coincidence, the Worm Song had been performed by Beyonce. You wouldn't be able to get her on. David Blan, I reckon you may ever get. Oh, God, I have tried, and I've been put off so many times. Neil Hannan from the Divine Comedy did

the Worms song, and now we can never speak to the person who read that narration. Never happening. Yeah. No, what I'd like to do, because I feel like we should explain it, because it's possible there are some Americans listening to this, for some reason, and they may not actually know

exactly what Worms even is. It might be going, what's happening? Why haven't I switched this off? In nine hours and we've heard nothing about what this is. Let's talk about what Worms is. Now, you're the expert, of course, but my understanding of Worms is

basically here's a quick description of what it's like to play it. You and up to a number of pals will have squads of worms. As I've mentioned, you can make your own squads, when you can pick some pre-made ones, for example, the Beatles or the Royal Family. If you ever wanted to blow up the Royal Family, which of course

we all have, did seem slightly distasteful today when there was a worm called the queen, but nonetheless, I did take a Uzi to her face. That is not what happened to him in real life, but had it been, I would not have done it.

She died behind closed doors, Stuart. None of us were in Buckingham Palace when it happened. It's true. Before we know, there was an exploding sheet and there's bits of Lizzie too every, just scattered across the walls of her Scotland home. It's actually quite a distressing

to think about, really. the poor sheep. I can't believe it. But anyway, worms, yes. Now, my understanding is this is essentially an end of evolution of the sort of artillery game that you used to get on, well, cover discs, except the ones I have played.

I think the one I played was just called artillery, and that itself was a remake, and you couldn't, unlike it worms, you couldn't move. I think you're just a stationary gun turret, and you aim the gun turret to whatever angle. The train is randomly generated, as in worms.

you would press space for however long you want to power up the weapon so you're basically in control of both the angle and the power of your shot but there are also things like wind resistance to take into account so it's essentially sort of a maths game except with all the boring maths just kind of exanguinated you don't have to think about you should have to you know it's doing sums but it's fun it's fun it makes learning fun essentially yeah um it's like maths blast really but what it was initially is like fun school three fun school three fun school Yeah, the Fun School episode when? I'd be asking that, I'd been asked that so many times. We've done the Fun School episode. Oh, yeah, we did do it, didn't we? Yeah. I'm just like you. You're like, did we do an episode about Discord?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, we did, idiot. And then now I'm like, oh, yeah, we did do that. I've got a sneaky feeling we've done this episode. But I was wondering if you ever fancied, like, doing an episode about something through your knuckles. Sorry, forget it. Not funny, not funny. Anyway, yes, Andy Davidson, the aforementioned Andy Davidson. Now, my understanding is that the,

Worms, which was not called Worms, was made for sort of for his buddies, like, sort of his college pals. But initially what it was, what it was, it was graphics ripped from Lemmings, from the Lemmings disc. That was definitely part of it. Apocryphal.

It is true. But that wasn't how it started. So, it started with Andy coding a kind of a, an artillery, scorched earth, guerrillas type game. Gorillas, of course, not to be confused

with the 2000s pop rock group of the same name, none of whom were real. It started with him making a game for a graphing calculator and then eventually taking those ideas and kind of rebuilding the game on the Amiga. There was some element of a... On the Amiga.

Dare involved. Like, I bet you can't make a game that works on a graphic calculator and he did. I think there was an element of that at the beginning. The Tintel was, bet you can't be bothered to make a game that runs on a graphic calculator. I bet you can't. can't be fucked. So sit down. Code a little game for your

little calculator. Anyway, so he starts making this game on the on the Amiga. Eventually, I think at the beginning it's soldiers and it's just called artillery. I don't think it was the artillery that you played because he never released it anywhere. No. And then he wrote a program

and he wrote a program to rip graphics from other games, other programs, and someone said, wouldn't it be funny if you replace the soldiers with Lemmings? So he did and it becomes Lemm Artillery. But which was, that was very much, like, the early 90s, there were so many, like, public domain and shareware games that were just ripping graphics from lemmings. I had an asteroid's clone called lemmsteroids. That was, it just had, it was, you just blew up lemmings of varying sizes. And then eventually he would, he replaces the lemmings with worms. And at some point, it stops being called lemm artillerium in becomes, I think, total wormage. And then, amiga format, that magazine, we've already mentioned them a couple of times on the show at this point, does a video game competition for games programmed in Blitz Basic. So Andy recodes the entire game from scratch in, I think, Blitz Basic, too, to enter this

competition. And it doesn't win, and it doesn't even get an honorable mention. So then Andy, at this point, wants to publish this game. He's telling people, you know, like his career counselor in school, he wants to get a game published. He's being asked if he wants to go. He's at school at this point, he's like late teens at this point I don't I cannot remember if he's at college or university but he's like everyone's like what do you want to do your life and he's like I want to get this game published and so he takes

he's not that much older than us wait I don't know what age you are I'm 72 so Andy Andy ends up putting a build of of worms on two floppy disks and taking it to I believe it was ECS it was a computer trade show in the UK

where he goes he makes a be line straight for Team 17 because they were the name in Amiga games in the early 90s. And he shows them the game and they love it and they sign him on the spot for a publishing deal. Yeah, I'd heard it was a literally

five minutes sort of demo and they were just like, yes, yes. I'm not sure what else. I mean, this is Team 17 of just to do a few of their Amiga hits, Assassin, I want to say quack, I want to say Project X,

I want to say the imbried, obviously. Superfrog? Lots. Did they do Superfrog? Of course it did Superfrog. It did Superfrog. What are we talking about? Superfrog's fantastic. Superfrog's even in a Worms game.

Body blows. The thing about Team 17 is that they were really well regarded and I, you know, looking back, I like a load of their games. But they don't sound like the sort of games that should have been good. Like Super Frog. Yeah, we've done like a character platformer game. Super Frog. There you go. That'll do.

Body blows. I think you know. I'm just in a bad example. We'll do that. That actually sounds amazing, a Super Frog. It's a super-powered frog who drinks Lucasade. What's not to love? Exactly.

But they were very good. Like, they just made games that were good. You know, so it's fine. Whatever they did. Lucasade has sort of a history with gaming, doesn't it? What with Super Frog and later, Laura Croft also being a fan of Lucasade. And the fat slags, but that's not really... Well, there was a Viz game, wasn't there?

I believe so, yeah. So I guess there is that. but I don't think people really want to hear about the fat slags anymore It's just a bit It hasn't aged well We'll put it that way But if you want to read about them Every month in your local issue of Viz

Is Viz still a going concern? It's still going I don't know if it's still a concern It's still very entertaining for me Because I think when I first saw it When I was about 19 or 18 Or maybe even younger I can't remember, old enough to read it,

it was very transformative on my sense of humor entirely, I think. So, yeah. And, you know, there is some of that humor sort of, I think, feeding into something like worms as well. But that's how I'm bringing this back. No, but you're right, though. That may be a bit of a stretch, but you are right. Like, all the British games being made in those days

had that sort of sense of humor somewhere at the heart of them. Yeah. And it is a game that's sort of tailored for humor, not just in the overt sense of like the voice packs of the one. You can choose a voice pack for your worms and they're all, let's be charitable. They're all amusing stereotypes essentially, some of which probably less amusing now than they used to be. Not yet, like the first game just had the standard voice. The first game, you had English, French and German and that was it.

And they didn't start adding other voice packs until... Didn't even know you had French and German? Yeah. The disc three of the Amiga version of worms just had the French and German vocals on it. And not the sound effects, because they would load the sound effects on the English speech bank. But yeah, it wasn't until Worms United, sorry, Worms Reinforcements and then Worms United was the first game that not only introduced voice packs as a thing you could put in the game, was also the first version of the game where each team could have its own separate voice pack. And the original worms, uh, 1995, although the, it was 93 that it was, like, pitched and it was picked up, uh, because it was in development for quite a long time.

Uh, well, originally team 17 was like, this could be a budget title. We can, you know, we can, you know, can fart this out for like, you know, 20 quid for the PC and the Amiga. And then there was real buzz, like people in the offices in Yorkshire in Osset, where Team 17 used to be located, if there was a computer, if there was an Amiga setup, it had worms on it. Stuff just wasn't getting done.

And then there was the realization kind of in-house that this could be big if we could get a multi-platform deal going. But that's outside of the scope, that's outside of Team 17's like, Sphere of influence at that point, they were doing, you know, Amiga and some PC stuff. They did not have, you know, the reach for console or the budget for console. And that's where they're publishing deal with Ocean Software came into play.

Ocean ends up publishing most of Team 17's games from like 95 onwards. Like Alien Breed 3D was published by Ocean. Worms was published by Ocean. I think Ocean ought published. I think they, I can't remember if the Ferris legacy, if Team 17 published that one themselves. or if that was part of the ocean deal. Budget X2 or whatever it was called. X2 was an ocean, was an ocean publishing deal.

Yeah. And I suspect that Worms 2 would probably have been ocean as well, had Ocean not been swollen hole by Microprose at the time. God, that's really weird to think of Microprose swallowing. We don't normally talk about swollen hole on this podcast, do we? Not on this podcast. I have a whole other podcast for that. You're going to get out. It's on your only fans, isn't it? Yeah, it's also...

It is actually also called body blows, though, which is... I think you're the only person with an audio-only only fans. An only person with an audio-only only fans that only has one subscriber, and it's my mum. But, yeah... My mum follows me on only fans! That's a horrible joke. I don't get that. Now, worms, the thing with... the original worms is quite... I wouldn't say bare bones, that's not really fair, but compared to what it would become,

It's quite bareboating. Do you have a selection of weaponry, you've got your sort of bazooker, your grenade, obviously each other controls differently, homing missile, which is essentially a bazooker that after a certain time in the air will become vaguely homing, quite accurately homing if memory serves in the original game, and the airstrike, etc.

But the sort of meat of it, the reason it's memorable is the sort of the sillier weapons, like the banana bomb, which is a banana, isn't it? It is an exploding banana that explodes into other bananas. Into other bananas, yes. And it is quite simple about respect, because I believe,

correct me if I'm wrong, because I played it again today, the original, and I couldn't find out how to do it, so I thought, okay, this isn't in it. Now, you can't switch worms in the first one. It's automatically, you can't choose the worms you want to use, which is correct, instantly. So, it is very much a turn-based sort of

deal-with-it kind of game. And the paired-down resort that you have. I'm not one of those people who think, like, the first one is the best one. I think it's great, but for me, I do like up to an Armageddon. But I feel like when you limit a player's resources like that, it really does kind of awaken something in it that makes it feel more serious. Is that weird? It makes it feel more... No, I agree with that wholeheartedly. Yeah, I think that one of the things that makes that original Worms game so captivating is that it is very easy to pick up and understand.

And the fact that the weapons and the tools that you have in that game are so... They're simple. Like, we know what a grenade is. We know what a bazooka is. You've got things like the blowtorch and the drill to, like, move through terrain. You've got teleport. You know, you've got your, you know, kind of your close quarter attacks, like the Dragon Ball and the Fire Punch.

The Dragon Ball. Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the fun things about some of those weapons, like, particularly the Dragon Ball, the fact that they are referencing other games. Like, that is a street fighter thing. They didn't have him say, they didn't go as far as to have the worm, say, Hadoon, or that they did have the worm. say that in Worms the Directors' Cup because at that point

who's buying Amiga games put whatever you want in. It's not like Capcom are going to sue you over 17 sold copies of a game where Worm goes Haduken. Until now when they hear this and go to town. Yeah. No statute of limitations on worms. It was Har Yarkin for the

Fire Punch and Zonken Zonkin for the Dragon Ball. I don't remember that one. Huh. And the reinforcement's expansion which would have, I don't know if it was the next year or the year after, I assume it was the next year, uh, sort of came along to flesh it out with your actual single player sort of campaign,

um, your actual ability to create your own stages, presumably through like, didn't it use like the sort of deluxe paint thing to make stages or, the, the PC version used BMPs. So hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, because when you were saying that this, the, the, the worms one was a very stripped down version, I agree, except that I was doing that in the original one without no its function or anything. The Amiga version did let you create IFF maps in Deluxe Payne.

That was it. And then Worms the Directors Cut goes one further and it's you create your own terrain styles for random terrain generation, your own mountain sets. I did a bunch of that. That's pretty cool. A couple of years ago, completed a project. I took all of the terrain styles and custom maps from Worms to Worms, Armaged, and the worms were a party

and downscaled them for use in worms the director's cut because I have no shame. I know the sort of generated stages where they would use like a sort of a text sort of algorithm sort of thing. So you could write down the code of a particularly good one

and give it to your mate. But was it Worms 2 where they added in or maybe Directors Cut because I'm not familiar with that one? Worms 2 where they added in the ability to just draw with a mouse like in paint pretty much and it would just generate it for you. Who didn't draw a big knob the first time they got that.

Everyone draws a big knob. Just a big, big willy. You have to do it. All stuff coming out at the end. Directors cut introduced that as a feature called graffiti mode. And then Worms 2 included that basically the exact same feature

with no changes and it's perfect. Yeah, it's great. And that's kind of something that has been lost in newer worms games is that isn't really a like Worms WMD, which was the latest newest worms game, not Counting Armaged Anniversary Edition does not have the ability to draw your own maps. It is not.

This is, yeah, this has been my complaint about certain entries in the series, because to me, I always thought of it as a very, very, a game that you could get your hands into creatively. Because as well as drawing, like, these elaborate, you could, like, full on just draw a cartoon thing in deep paint. I had one that was, like, a caricature of me lying down that you could blow up and things like this. You could draw anything you wanted. But as well as that, I was going, I don't think this was, you know, this was like supported, but not a thing that many people knew you could do. But I was taking, I was replacing all the samples as well.

I was recording my own voice samples. I did that. And as long as I had a sampler and I had ProTracker and as long as they were the same length, I assumed it would work and it did. Oh, they didn't even have to be the same length. As long as the files weren't too big and they could fit in memory. Yeah, it was fine. So I was recording all clips off Red Dwarf and stuff and having them say stuff.

like the main room what I remember is when somehow I made it so that when a bomb went off in the sea Crichton would go splash quibum or something I don't know there must have been a sound for that specifically

that I replaced with that or something so you could be really creative with worms it was great WMD the PC version the Steam version in particular does have a Steam workshop integration for things like

custom maps and like custom hats because newer worms game that you put a little like for your worms out of thing now yeah That is quite good. That's quite good. That's one of those additions where I can imagine it having been in the original.

Like, can't you imagine them having little witches hats on and cowboy hats on the Amiga? That is the thing, is that one of the April Fool's Day jokes that Team 17 did for Worms World Party was an involved hats. It was like they did like a nighttime mode where it was all of your worms were dressed as babies with like bonnets and diapers. And you had to put the worms to bed instead. Team 17 used to do an April Fall's Day gag every year until I want to say

like 2005 and they were almost all worms like the night their 99 April 4's day gag was they announced a ZX Spectrum port of Worms Armageddon Oh

I don't someone's actually done that now It's almost certainly been ported I mean there's a teletext port of Worms now It's playable on teletext That's incredible Blow Up Town of the Worm and Bambor Boozler

Amazing A little teletext reference for the kids there Thank you. Now, the original game ported to all sorts of things. Pretty much everything had this game. I'm just going to list them, as I've found. It was on this Amiga, CD-32.

I bet that was worth having. It was on the JAG, the Atari JAG, you are. Last commercially released game for the JAG, it came out in 98. Yeah, one of the telegames ones, wasn't it? When you can only buy it through their website, and there were only about four copies. Yeah. They came out on the Game Boy, I bet that was really good. I remember it being on the Mac.

I remember being on DOS, because that was the one I played. It was on the old Mega Drive, and it was a very good version, which is also the version I think they used for the Evercade Worms cartridge that came out a little while ago. Yeah, the Mega Drive slash Sega Genesis version of Worms was the one they included on that car. Yeah, I remember asking them about that because I was like, ignorantly, you know, why didn't use the PlayStation version? And they're like, because it's not as fun.

And I was like, interesting, interesting, because I would have just assumed it was better and closer to the original. But I mean, I guess with the disc accessing and stuff, it probably wasn't as much fun. Well, one of the other things is that Evercade cartridge also had the PS1 version of Worms Armageddon on there. And I think that if, you know, I think that the 16-bitworms games,

firstly, they didn't get released outside of Europe. So, like, America didn't get the Mega Drive or Super Nintendo versions. Oh, dear. They're not, they're not as robust as, you know, the PC version, Amiga version, the PlayStation version. But there is a charm to.

There is something kind of unique to those versions of the games that is charming, and it's nice to see that, because you can buy, if you want to play the original worms, as it was on the PlayStation, the satin on the PC, that's on Steam, that's on Gog.com, that's fine. But no one's preserved, no, no, no, you would think no one would be interested in preserving the Mega Drive or the SNES versions of those games. And it's nice to see them get a little bit of love. Yeah, it's a good old Evercade once again, really. I love that Evercade, big fan. and they were planning on putting it on the 32x apparently and the virtual boy but neither of those saw the light of day

for what I hope for obvious reasons they announced the virtual they never even started coding the virtual boy version I've had conversations I just announced it for the joke 17 about well the last page of the manual for Alien Breed 3D was an ad for worms

and it listed the virtual boy the 32X the Jaguar etc etc it just listed all of these platforms and they I guess that that was like we had it with plans to put these games out on these systems and some of them did we didn't even start developing them I don't think a 32x version would a 32x version probably

wouldn't have been much different from the alien breed 3D magazine in the back it's just like hey you bought alien breed 3D2 you can probably run this and you can probably afford it too yeah wow I've got to do alien maybe into a general team 17 episode sometime I don't know this isn't it obviously this is just ones but yeah what we said

We talked about reinforcement sort of sprucing up, but the next version. Now, I assume that Director's Cut came before Worms 2, or was it around the same year, I know, but... They were developed at the same time. Worms' Directors' Cut was originally supposed to come out in, I think, Christmas of 96, and ended up coming out in April of May of 97. And the reason Worms the Directors' Cut exists is Team 17 were working on Worms 2 at the time. Which is Windows 95 sort of... Yeah, absolutely.

And the prevailing attitude at Team 17 at the time was we were just going to make Worms 2 is basically just going to be an HD version of Worms. It's going to be updated graphics, but we're not adding new features. If it wasn't in Worms and Worms reinforcements, we're probably not adding anything new. And Andy wanted to play with the format and play with the formula and add new weapons and features. So he used Worms the Director's Cut as kind of a proving ground for new weapons. And this is where we get things like, you know, the concrete donkey, the holy hand grenade, the super sheet, the baseball bat, the handgun, you know. a lot of the things that we kind of take for granted our kind of staples of the Worms franchise

originate in Worms the Directors' Cut and it was Andy saying we can still do more this can become more than just what it was and he would put stuff in Directors Cut other people at Team 17 would play Directors Cut while it was in development and they go oh yeah we should you know what let's put that one in Worms 2 as well until basically almost everything from Worms the Directors Cut

except for the sheep on a rope which was a ninja rope with a sheep on it. They just go, no, Andy, that one's stupid. We're not having that. I'm sure there must have been something, but I think the only feature that Directors Cut has that Worms 2 onwards doesn't have is the ability to create your own custom, like, landscape types

for random map generation, and also the sheep on a rope. But even the sheep on a rope found its way into WMD, like 19 years later. Wow. The thing that fascinates me about triple- cut. And this is a very boring anecdote. I'm really sorry. Great. When I was much younger, they used to be this like remanded books sale

near my house, where they would sell loads of books that were new books that had just not been sold. They would, like they would end up back at the stock. That meant lots of strategy guides because people just weren't buying them. Right. So I had the Prima or Prime, I don't know, strategy guide for Worms Armageddon. I was like, yes, I'm having that.

And I still got it. Two, three paid spread just about the director's cut. Yeah, but I didn't know it existed. So I'm looking through it, and it's like, and I'm pretty switched on to Worms. I was Worms kid. I was just like, yeah, hell yeah, worms. I love all the Worms games. Let's go. And I'm reading this book, and it's just like, yeah, the cluster

homing missile is in these games. Like Worms 2, Worms 2, what the hell is Worms director's car? What do you mean it's got the Super Sheep in it? The Super Sheep is from Worms 2. This can't be real. And then it turns out that it barely was real, but it was in fact real. It didn't still alive.

No, but it was like, I've read online, it's 5,000, but that's obviously just made-up number, so I'll tell you where the source... I know exactly where that 5,000 copies sold source comes from, me. Because in 1999, I had a Worms the Directors' Cup fan site called the Worms Directors' Cut experience, and I'd read somewhere that it only sold 5,000 copies. I don't know where I had read that, but I put it on the website, and it has been reported as fact ever since then. I've regurgitated that fact. I have a team... I had, it still

exist a Team 17 fan site called Dream 17. Clever title I know. Brilliant. And I repeated the fact on there as well, like 20 some years ago when I launched that website. That I do not know where I got that number from, but it has been reported as fact. Now, if it is factual, if that is the number, and considering this was an Amiga game released in the spring of 97, you know, it sounds like a lot. 5,000 sounds like too many to me. It sounds, it doesn't sound unreasonable for the time. But also, when the A500 Mini came out a couple of years ago and they included Worms the Director's Cut on the A500 Mini,

that means that that release of the A500 Mini has massively outsold the original release of Worms, the Director's Cut, by a factor of tons. Yeah. And Worms the Directors Cut actually got an update, didn't it, a few years ago? Are I imagining this, or it was planned one?

So the only quote-unquote official update that was ever released was later in 97. It was version 1.05. Team 17 did not release this patch widely. There was a bloke who is on the English Amiga board under the name of Mad Matt

and he wrote to Team 17 because the original retail release of Worms of the director's cut has some game-breaking bugs in it. He wrote asking if there was an update and they mailed him a disc. And as far as I'm aware, that's the only copy of that disc that was ever mailed out. Is he distributed it?

He dumped it in, I forget, the common Amiga disc format, ADZ or whatever it was at the time. And then I converted it to ADF for use and emulators. And that is now kind of widely the patchedisc that is out. In 2018, Andy Davidson on social media posted a screenshot with a new version number and a build date of like May 2018. And he was talking about, he was working on a new update, he was going to add new features, he was going to add like the rising water in sudden death he was going to add um you know retreat time to every weapon not just the you know dynamite and landmines he was going to add worm select um and that unfortunately for various technical reasons did not materialize um so it i know it's i i know

it's something that he wants to do like worms the director's cut is is still his baby um but uh it's just not something that he's been able to work on it's very personal isn't it like I remember at the time, knowing, you know, maybe this was even slightly before I got online. Perhaps I read it in games magazines that, you know, the concrete donkey was out of his mum's back garden and banana fish. There's a picture of it, I think, online. I think I've seen it or at least something very like that, yeah.

There were references to, like, his back garden. He had this goldfish called banana fish, and that was involved somehow. Didn't it, wasn't it, like, just like random messages would come up on the original title screen that said something, something banana fish? Am I making that up? There's definitely a banana fish reference in one of the various random messages that appears on the map generator on the original worms. Is that what I'm thinking of?

The map generator. Might be. But also, if you emailed Andy, Andy's email address at the time was The Worm at Team17.com. I don't think that email address was... Nothing to do with Worms. He just had a very low opinion. Yeah, he just didn't really, just very low self-stained. And his email signature at the time, his ASCII signature, was the Worms logo,

with a grenade made out of like forward and backslashes and an equal symbol. But he had, in his signature, the phrase, it was yellow, it was a fish, but with a yellow banana-like covering. And I don't know what that was ever a reference to, but that was in his email signature at the time, baffling, but wonderful. And so it was very personal, like, the game was just full of, like, personal references. And it makes a lot of sense to me that that's kind of his, that's what he thinks of as being the game in his heart, the Worms game. but more to that point like Worms the Directors' Cup was the very last game Team 17

ever released themselves on the Amiga like it was the last game that they developed in-house that they wanted to put out they were a couple of the last like games on the Amiga like overall one of the last like at the time like going concerns for Amiga Amiga development and

one of the reasons why Andy wanted to do Worms the Directors cut and why it was such a big deal at the time was you know he had grown he'd learned to program or, you know, he kind of come up on the Amiga, like he was given the freedom to kind of like make stuff like Worms on the Amiga. I think it might

actually been one of the videos on the anniversary edition on the switch that says that Andy might be like one of the last bedroom coders of his error. Like Worms is one of the last like indie bedroom coded bedroom computer game. The sort of pre, I'm going to do air quotes, but the listeners

can't see them. The pre's indie indie sort of like the Matthew Smith's and you're sort of. Yeah, exactly. He's in that vein of the guys who put out games for the spectrum, the Oliver Twins and all that, and him. And, yeah, he must be, yeah, he's got to be the last one. Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh. Uh... First of a lot! So, sort of the commercial face of, um, of worms at this point of, um, of worms at this point, is the commercial face of, um, of worms at this point is. Worms 2, which is the 1987 game, as alluded to H.D.

Worms. What they did essentially is it's all been redrawn, and it's now, it's a bit more Disney-shaped in a sense. I was salty about this at the time. It were you. It took me a while. It took me into the same boat. Yeah.

The thing is, they're my worms, so I don't mind that. But having played the original again today, I did find sort of something is a little bit missing. And, you know, the little pixel a wiggle when you jump. There is something about it that's kind of gone once the cartoony graphics come in.

Though I'll take them for the gameplay enhancements. Though obviously if one's director's cut is giving you both the enhancements and the original or closer to the original sort of visuals, that sounds like a perfect sort of ideal. I never had director's cut and I wish I had. Because yes, the

original worms were just a line of pixels. And it And it had that same thing. We keep accidentally saying Lemmings. Because it had that same thing of like, here's just like eight pixels, but we've animated them just right so that they are very, very expressive. It has a lot of character and charm to it in a way that, you know, I think that's one of the reasons why the original worms was compared so frequently to Lemmings

is because of that charm. Like I remember a lot of gaming magazines, or maybe it was just one or two, and I only read those ones, but it described worms as like Lemmings, meets cannon fodder. Yeah. And I remember that, yeah. Yeah, and I think that there was something, it had that charm to it, that I think the transition to the kind of the more wacky cartoony style from like

Worms 2, Armageddon and World Party, when I first saw the box art and saw the screenshots on the back of the box, I thought, this looks very flat and uninteresting. And I think that when you play the game, and Stuart, I think because Worms 2 was your first worms game, I think you can probably attest to this. Yeah. There are so many small movements. The animation in Worms to Armageddon and World Party is so fluid and smooth, and it has so much charm and character, and there's so much detail and so much, these little, tiny details at the little idle animations that they do,

and the fact that they're breathing and the fact that when their health drops below 30, they start, like, panting and, like, they're at short and breath. Like, they go from being these kind of, again, these kind of charming shapes to kind of being these characters. there is character there. They react to their surroundings. They are they, you know, they look at, you know, when a projectile flies overhead, you have a woman, oh, fuck. Like, you don't swear, but like, that's the expression.

You can make them if you want. You can make them say fuck if you want. But you can't name them that unless you can. I don't know. You absolutely can. Can you do that in the new one? I've not tried. I want to make a whole team that's just the C word over and over again.

The same worms have been on my team since 1996. I still use it. It's like a D&D campaign, isn't it? Yeah. See, my friend had a one called Red Claw, and I thought that was really cool. I was like, that's a pretty cool name. So I made a worm called Gold Claws. Now, note the plural, and note the gold, because Red Claw, kind of cool, gold claws,

because gold is supersonic, isn't it? Gold is better. And it's got more than one of them, therefore, Gold Claw's Mogg's Red Claw, quite frankly. Well, mine, mine is called. obsidian talons so mine's better again it's a obsidian shape that's that's way better than mine mine hate my worms now mine is called white lightning that's pretty good mine is called platinum nail gun platinum hits the PlayStation budget re-release line of ones of ones which probably sold pretty well it did very well yeah I mean the

The thing about the platinum hits range is that Sony published all of those games. So they would pick a game that was selling well, and then they bung out those silver-sleeved reissues. The original worms got a platinum release. Armageddon World Party and Pimble on the PlayStation did not. It's a shame. I've never fully understood those because I remember, you know, as a kid or as a teenager or whatever, like,

whenever I saw on those, they always had a design that made me want the game less than if they'd just brought out the proper one again. You know, because it was always like a box in a box. No, it's like, yeah, the platinum ones were just a, the PlayStation strip at the bottom, and a black strip that said PlayStation would just now be silver. But there were a lot of budget people, things like the IDOS budget, which really was just like a weird green slime effect

with the box of the game in the middle quite small. Oh, that's probably what I'm thinking of. And that's the version of Geck's deep cover Gecko that I had. And let me tell you, it didn't make me enjoy that game any less, because uh gex was a proper game you know um ocean were fucking awful for this because they did shit like this oh oh my gosh right you can't see this they are holding up the game boy box i'm going to describe what this is sorry davy you're already doing it i'll let you do it well i'm not the host here you're allowed to do it okay fine i'll do it it's a game boy version of worms but what's happening

here is the game you can probably google this um the game boy logo on the side is as as normal the vertical game boy logo that somehow gives the whole thing an intense power but I digress now at the top is the logo for worms but beneath it

is a sort of box of worms the whole box in the box of worms yeah it's like a 3D render of the box yeah but it says worms

worms the box is casting a shadow and the rest of it is just white yeah so it's sort of like worms has gone to limbo isn't it? It's got the Team 17 and Ocean logos twice,

the Nintendo's seal of quality twice. The Game Boy thing that says that you can, it's an original Game Boy pack is on there twice. The Worms logo is on there twice. The Game Boy, the Nintendo logo,

is on there twice. And then it's just, this is wholly unnecessary. It is silly, isn't it? I've not been able to find a copy of the Game Boy version of Worms that has the original art. This is the only copy.

Oh, there was one. Yeah. There was one. There must have been. I bought this specifically to take scans of the box for a website. The cartridge at least has the proper label on it. And you only get one of them. Only one cartridge in there as well.

Yeah, it's messed up, right? And one's stupid. Yeah. And the cartridges even have a picture of a cartridge on it. It reminds me of the infamous Castle of Wayne of Sonoru Kalami Bestov. Look it up sometime. Oh, my God. Yeah.

You know the one. Yeah. It's very much like that, except slightly less bad than that, I would say. There is something slightly tasteful about there. up. Yeah, it should be though, because, you know, it's very inconsistent. But, yeah, to jump back to Worms 2 here

briefly, I've mentioned this already now, because this was directly a Windows game and I'm sorry, I mean, no offense to the Amiga Spods. Sorry I said Amiga Spods. I can't help myself. I don't mean it. I sort of been it a bit, but I don't really mean it. But I do. Yeah. The interface is much more

standard Windows 95-ish in that you are essentially, when you play the game, you sort of get a launcher, which is just a window, which is just like, here's where you customize your game, pick the kind of game you want to play, or you check your boxes. Now, in this game, you could manually modify the parameters of all of the weapons individually,

so you could make them as hideously powerful and dangerous. It was so robust. Yeah. You could change, like, how many clusters a cluster bomb has and how much damage everything does. And it was deeply, robust. If you wanted to get in kind of really fiddle with like the, you know, get granular with how how much damage a cluster bomb or a bazooka or a stick of dynamite or any of that stuff does,

you really can just, and because of the way that the slide has worked, and because of the way it saved those, those values in the, in the scheme file, it had separate, separate files for weapons settings and option settings. So you could, you could create options and settings and weapon settings and mix and match and create different game styles. But because of the way they were saved in the options files, it was very easy to edit them to get values beyond what these sliders allowed you to do. See, I didn't know this, and now I want to go back to it. That's how I managed to crash the game.

It was ridiculous. Crashing the game with like 255 banana bomb clusters was my special. Worthy though. I think that what I used to like to do was I would edit the minigons so it fired 60 bullets and also every bullet did 200 damage and every bullet did the largest possible amount of terrain damage and then you position yourself directly

underneath an enemy worm and essentially surf them on the bullets for as long as possible that was enormous fun but another thing that was in this game and this was in a much smaller scale in the first game is they added in secret super weapons that would only show up in crates unless you type super

shopper which was the cheat you can have that one for free and they also and the weapon that Whenever a super weapon would show up, I got more excited than I've ever been in my life before or since, because this game that you love, and then finally there's something that you've never seen before, and you can go to your mates at school and say,

I got Pacti's Magic Bullet, I don't know what it means, but I got it. And all sorts of things like that. Like, there was one that, I can't want it was cool, but it would make the water rise, and that became a normal weapon, I think, in the night. Oh, that was just the nuke, was it? Yeah, which was also introduced in Directors' car. Oh, I'm sure what most of these level.

And then from Armageddon onwards It also poisons every worm on the map So they gradually lose HP Not having played Because I skipped too Because I was so weirded out by how it looked And Armageddon was where I learned to like it And I thought that was called Armageddon

Because it introduced Newk I'm surprised that that's not the case No, that introduced Armageddon The Armageddon weapon where all of the asteroids drop Yeah, lots of fun But that's But that's But that

But that sense of discovery was an enormous fun playing a multiplayer, the fact that you could just get something that you've never seen, seen before or was so powerful it would turn the game around, you know. I think that was the Salvation Army one of those or was that actually a normal weapon that you just didn't get very often? I can't remember. Salvation Army was a super weapon in Worms 2

I believe. Yeah. Yeah. And the Worms 2 also added in some odd things like you had, as well as the airstrike, there was a homing strike which when you mess with the parameters would become hilariously powerful. There was also a male strike,

like a postal strike where it would drop some letters on you that then explain. Also a one's D.C. original, yeah. Yeah. And the Super Sheep was introduced. Now, the Super Sheep is the most fun thing in the world. I'm going to explain what it is. The original sheep is a...

We've not mentioned the original sheep. You've got to talk about the sheep. We're doing it now. And the sheep would move forward and occasionally it would bar and it would jump. And I think it would automatically jump when there was a drop. Am I wrong about that? It would... The jumping is predictable to a certain extent. But there would, there are a lot of things that would cause...

Yeah. That would trigger the... jump, and sometimes it would just do it. Yeah. But the super, so you'd release the sheep, it would walk towards your enemy. Suppose there's a small gap. The sheep would reach the edge of the gap. It would note that there was a gap, and it would do a jump.

The jump wouldn't necessarily clear it, but it would try. And when it got to your enemy, you'd hit space, and I think it's like 70 damage or something. I've seen, just a very powerful weapon. I have still got somewhere a tape of my 15th or 14th birthday party, or whatever it was that year, and the raucous explosion of laughter when my friend first saw a super sheep

it was just not a super sheep sorry just the sheep in Worms 1 it was really funny this little sheep bounding along going and blowing up more than anything ever blew up it was just a don't know how to explain it it was super funny

but the super sheep is initially is the same as a sheep but then when you hit space instead of exploding it flies up zipses the air vertically and it gains a Superman cape, and it goes, do-da-d-do. You can steer it with left-bred on the keyboard. Yes. And actually, if you're good, you can fly it around basically the entire level

and then pilot exactly where you want it to go. And it was enormous fun. And Worms Armageddon introduced the Aqua Sheep, which is basically a super sheep with a blue cape and snorkels, so you can actually fly it into the water. Here's a fun fact. The version of the Super Sheep introduced in Worms, the Director's cut. Did that anyway.

Oh, it was just better. Amiga supremacy for the win. and there were many other weapons I'm not going to list all of them but I think the ones that I enjoyed the most in the base weapon sort of load out which was now enormous compared to the original like really big

it had to have multiple tiers of different weapons I loved the baseball bat because it was just very satisfying to twat things with it that wasn't in the first one I mean stupid because you'd use the fire punch in the first one for the baseball bat stuff

the baseball bat was introduced in director's car And then they include it in Worms 2. They actually restricted it in Worms 2 because in Worms of the Redis Court, you have a full 180 degree of motion. And in Worms 2 onwards, they restricted the range, I think, to like a 90 degree flat angle

up to about 45 degrees, I think. I recall this, but the most brilliant of all the weapons, and I'm sure this was introduced in Directors' cut as well, most likely, is the prod, the Pope. I was just about to ask, Does Nudge come in? Was that in the original?

Prod was in the original. The unique thing about... Not at all. The interesting thing, because it's not selectable on the weapons panel on the Amiga version because it is a secret move.

Special move. It was a way away towards. Yes, and then your worm just does the shoves, and it's brilliant. It's one of those delightful little Easter eggs. It was for when there was an enemy worm who just happened to be standing at the edge of a, you know,

like a drop into the sea. Which your opponent would do because they had no reason to believe there was anything wrong with that and you could just walk up and just boff. Give me a lot of it to see. Brilliant. What I used to love about that is how an engineer situations where

due to perhaps another piece of ground being destroyed an enemy worm or your friend, I should say, would end up somewhere where the prod would kill them. And then when it came to your turn, the begging began. Like, the please don't, there's no need. Come on, that's my last worm. Please don't. Not like this. Oh, but I'm losing.

Get Graham. Graham's doing much better than I am. We're playing a no prod game, by the way. Those are the rules for this one. I'm playing no, no, no, no, no dodge on this. Yeah, no prods. I think that was a real thing that we had, actually. No prods and no dark side, which we haven't even explained.

But we want to know. Yeah. But the prod, just the ultimate, like, humiliation weapon, just like, you shouldn't have stood there, mate. You shouldn't have stood there, mate. And they were just full for their, deaths into the water, and it would go, and it would be dead, and it would be wonderful. It's the most embarrassing way to lose a whole game of worms. Yeah.

Except throwing a grenade that then bounces back and hits you and then you die. That's maybe worse. Or getting blown up, landing on another worm that then dies, and then the worm kills them with the explosion and with the plunger. What you're doing here is, this is what's good about worms. We've talked about how, like, oh, yeah, you hold the space bar down to get the right trajectory for your bazooker. This, though, is what's good.

It's this thing of like, yeah, just daft stuff keeps happening because there's physics involved and it just can go wrong and you can be bad at it in a funny way and, yeah, and good at it. There's sort of the element of chaos, like the addition, because we haven't mentioned this either, but the entire terrain can be sprinkled with landmines, it often is. But the landmines won't always explode. Sometimes they'll be dud landmines. Introduced in worms reinforcements. Yeah, which can lead to real tension when you get the beeping noise that is about to explode

but then suddenly smoke comes out, nothing happens. Yeah. Worms 2 also had the oil barrels, but I think you had to switch them on manually. Like you had to manually change it so all of the mines were oil barrels. So, yeah, when Worms 2 released at retail, oil barrels were a cheat code, and then they added it as a feature with an update, and you could toggle between having mines or oil barrels. And then in Armageddon and World Party, you can have just mines, just oil barrels,

a combination of both, or nothing. because this also introduced sort of a fairly reactive fire I don't think the flamethrower was in Worms 2 but the napalm strike was and the oil barrels would explode in Petrobon was yes of course the Molotov so all kinds of options for ending your friendships

there and Guys I'm going and playing some worms after this I was playing worms before this I literally before we started I was playing a game the game of worm's on again on the switch. I did a sheep maneuver. You backflip in the air. You release

the sheep at the peak of your trajectory, so it immediately jumps outward, and it arched in the air, landed on top of the enemy worm. I hit space. It blew up, and my opponent, rage quit. Because of a sheep. That is outstanding. You did good.

Just every time you mention these different weapons and things, I just get little flutters of warmth of my heart of that day in 95 and the time since then. That's an interesting thing you've raised there, Ben, because we haven't talked about the online multiplayer thing here at all, which is, of course, the kind of lifeblood of this game now to some extent. Because I'm going to be wrong about this as well,

because I've never been the sort of online gaming sort of person ever, really. But worms definitely, yes. Now, I don't recall if the original one, I mean, the Amiga one presumably didn't have it. I don't know if it was at all. But I don't remember DOS worms having it either. It was a hot seat. sort of game where you'd crowd around the keyboard. I imagine it probably did have it at some point, but

Worms 2 was the first one I can remember having directly built into it the whole Wormnet thing. I might be wrong about this. Worms 2 had, and also had different servers internationally. There were two UK servers, a US server and a Japanese server. Two UK servers and one US server. Yeah.

And the, the, yeah, the US, sorry, the, the, the, the, the, The Worms 2 servers, like WormNet and kind of online play kind of blew up worms in a way that just playing them with your friends didn't quite accomplish. Oh, you do all play up worms. Yeah, it goes about saying. But I'm still going to say. So this whole community develops online, and this is when people start to develop, like, game styles, like, forts, where you have a custom, like, a graffiti map where you've got two sets of, you know, two separate islands and people are throwing grenades back and forth. or like rope races and super sheep races.

These things kind of all developed through the online community. I will not name names because it is not my story to tell, but someone I know who went on to become a game designer at game studios like gearbox software and a couple of other places got their start coming up with new ways to play Worms 2 online. There's Randy Pitchford, wasn't it? It was absolutely Randy Pitchfitt. No, it wasn't Randy.

I don't know that Randy Pitchford knows what Worms is. But this person kind of got their start in game design making game styles for Worms 2 and was a pretty high-ranking player in the 90s on Worms 2. See, now, it was, I mean, while Worms 2 did have this, did have online play, it's Armageddon and the sort of additional level of customization that is the one that's sort of endured. It has continued to be. But Worms 2-1 thing I will mention real quick is it was I remember that this also had a sort of a single-player campaign that felt like it took the shape of the later ones in the sense that it was almost a puzzle game

where you'd have certain levels of resources with which you need to win a situation. But the main thing I remember about it is that the passwords told a story about worms. Yes. Which is how I can remember the passwords. Which is the first one is once upon A, then it's time there were, then it's some small worms.

It goes on like that. It goes on like that. Worth looking up sometime if you want to read a very, very compelling piece of... There's a story, and then there's a few passwords that are an apology for not having time to localize the passwords. And then the last few levels are something to the vector. You might think you'll unlock a pretty cool cheat mode when you finish the single player campaign, and you are right. The last password for the last mission is, and you are right. But do you?

You do. It tells you the cheat codes that were already publicly available on the internet at that. Outstanding. I remember because the final mission is quite literally an artillery puzzle where you have, I think, a few shotgun shots where you have to take out all of the worms from very long distances in one turn or possibly... No, it is one turn, because if they get a turn off,

they'll just immediately AI you to death. So that's the main thing I remember about the AI from worms is that generally it would just be kind of like, yeah, grenade, cross the entire map, bank off that, bank off that, land on you the exact second it explodes, done, goodbye. which is why you don't play AI ever Say no to AI In all respects

Although even still Even in the anniversary edition of Worms Armageddon To unlock the various cheats You have to finish the single player campaign You have to finish death match mode You have to get gold on all of the various training modes And that was true in the original PC version But like recently

I think with the 3.8 update for Worms Zambagden Which came out in 2020 They added a cheat code that you could type in the main menu And it would unlock all of that stuff for you I wonder if the Switch, the new one has that. The new one is Switch, PS5 and Xbox presumably. Yeah.

So the new version doesn't have, I mean, I saw on the Switch, because I did try it, doesn't have USB keyboard support. And the front end is completely rewritten from the ground up. It's only the in-game that is ported. The front end is an entirely new front-end that was designed and developed by digital eclipse. But, yeah,

But, yeah, But, yeah, But, yeah, let's talk about one. But, yeah, let's talk about one Zamageddon, because it's, it's the one that's just been re-released, which is to suggest that it's ever been unreleased, because it really hasn't. It's been constantly released since, what, 1999? 1999. It came out in January of 1999 in the UK. It came out in Japan, I want to say, in March of March of.

of 99, and then in the U.S. in April of 99, I religiously followed the Worms-Armageddon development blog on their website. And there's a blog post, and I can't find it. And I don't know if it was real or if it was an April Fool's Day joke. But I remember reading a blog post where they were having trouble making projectiles work on the N-64 version. And they were talking about right now the current build of Worms-Zamaged on the N-64 does not have grenades, does not have bazookas because they can't make the physics work on the N64. And then of course, the N64 version came out and

is, I think, of the console versions, except for the menus. The menus are horrible. But in-game it is the most faithful poor of Worms-Uroman. Up until this new one. You'd think it was the Dreamcast, but apparently not. Even the Dreamcast magazines at the time were saying, don't sell your N-64 yet

because it's not quite there. Yeah. The Dreamcast version's very nice. It's the prettiest of the bunch, but it doesn't have... The PS1 and the Dreamcast versions don't have any of the flame weapons. So the napalm, strike, petrol bomb, flame thrower, oil cans. I mean, oil cans are in there, but they don't burst into flame. They just explode.

Such an odd thing to lose. Whereas the N64 version has, and I think it's a sprite limitation thing, right? The more sprites, particularly computers at the time, the more sprites that were on the screen at the time, the more the game would slow down. Like, the PS1 and Dreamcast versions didn't even have, like, the clouds in the sky. because the sprites were so, it was so limited. I can imagine that Sony weren't that happy about that game being on the PlayStation in the first place, though.

That sounds like the sort of game they would probably not want to release. I will tell you this. I will say this about it. Sega were very, very happy. Worms World Party exists because the planned online mode for Armageddon on the Dreamcast got scrapped. And then Sega were like, hey, could you make an online version of Worms Armageddon? and so they did they did world party instead and because the dream cast was already kind of not doing very well

that was that was why they decided to do world party as a PC game and then later it got released for the PS1 on the game boy advance but the but worms Armageddon like superficially i mean in game it looks like worms too more or less but what so what is what is what makes this one so enduring compared to the others do you think um i i think it's just, there is stuff that got taken away from Worms, too. Like those sliders, those very nice sliders from the Windows version that kind of gave you that much control and fidelity

with what you could do, that's gone in Armageddon. I remember being disappointed about that when I first fired up Armageddon. I bought Armageddon in, I want to say 2000, they did a package called the Armageddon collection that included Worms Armageddon, addiction pinball, and a Worms Armageddon screensaver

where the AI just played against itself until you move the mouth. Not even Worms pinball unless that addiction pimble has the one's table yeah addiction pimble had the worms table and the table for world rally fever which was a racing game that team 17 did in i want to say 96 i remember addiction pinball because it had that little cheese strings fella and he looks like the cheese strings guy it's all i remember about addiction pinball that was the style that they did for worms they kind of was this weird hybrid of like worms one and worms two where it was worms one proportions but more cartoony and so the gut the worm has kind of this kind of coil of not hair

but like it's the top of the worm but the face is in the middle of the worm. I thought it was just like the addiction pinball guy, but finding out it's a worm is my world of art. Yeah, that's a worm, yeah, yeah. I want to see this worm. Can someone find me at some point? It doesn't have me now,

but I want to see a picture of this worm. We'll find the worm for you. I'll show you the worm later, though. Yes, please. But Armageddon, while it doesn't have those sort of modifiers, well, it does have the modifiers, but not in the same format, not in the same break, sort of completely breakable,

manner, at least without using sort of, I guess, some external stuff. You can still make those changes and you can still use all these modifiers, but they've been given a sort of graphical interface rather than just a Windows interface, which in some ways is better and more accessible, perhaps,

since it's all right there in the game as opposed to, like, you've launched a separate kind of a... It's easily portable across the different formats, isn't it? Yes, yeah, exactly. Probably why they did it. Because the Worms 2-1, you could almost mistake for Microsoft Access

or something. Like, whoops. And I do like the fact that they've gone for a more cohesive thing there. I do like that. But, yeah, I remember just the game feeling a lot more

atmospheric for some reason. I think the menus were all very atmospheric and the noises they made and the music in the background. It was quite... Is that something that Worms does have, is Rale it does have the comical sound effects and the comical speech banks and everything. The music has always been kind of war music. But, like, atmospheric war music

as opposed to a sort of Do, do, do, do, do, do, do that whole thing. I certainly remember that in Armageddon, you could, like, leave it long enough that a Worm Song would play with... Yeah, the main menu had, it was the, Worm Song, 99. Yeah.

Was there one of those in two, or... Is this the first time? Worms two did not have a worm song. Armageddon had two. Oh, wow. The other one? The other one was the stat screen music. If you left it running long enough,

it would do a version of the worm song telling the exact same story, but it was the Angry Scotts And it used a lot of Scots voice. In Scottish, yeah. And it used a lot of Scots kind of slang and terminology and language. And now it's the current call. The final onslaught.

No better bully could you possibly have bought. But spare a thought for Boggy and with his friend. So fight for their honour and fight until the end. The Anamageddon adds in much more expensive single player options in respect of like So much stuff there Yeah the campaign is a lot better Like there's the kind of mission mode Where you're testing out your sort of ability to the different weapons

And then there's the leagues, the death match leagues and stuff But just a lot more things to play with and in a lot more more compelling of a sort of a skin, I guess I would say. So much fun. I think something about it just made it more accessible. And like, that was the one, I mean, maybe, I don't know if this played out anywhere except in my life, but like, I think this was around the time that laptops started to become affordable. And I remember I happened to have a laptop. It was like a big birthday present or Christmas prayer, whatever it was to get me ready to go to university. My granddad was like, I want to get him a laptop so

you can take a computer and do his work. So, of course, I took that straight into A level. and we were all just playing Worms Armageddon, and we got absolutely obsessed with that, and Sonic R, as it goes. And you could just play with Worms, Armageddon against each other all the time in the Sixth Form Social Centre. What more could anybody want out of life than that? And Armageddon was, it was perfect for that,

because it was just friendly for people who perhaps didn't have the background in already being obsessed with worms like I did. You know, it just made sense. The fact that it was, I mean, it's not as rare as I'm going to make it sound, but this is a PC game that has hot seat multiplayer with one keyboard, one mouse but you don't need

to have two inputs, multiple controllers obviously, you can just take turns. And then you get the tension of watching your opponent beat the shit out of you and or fail to beat the shit up to you going and there's something so compelling about that that online play just doesn't capture for me. Yes, I remember when I did start playing.

It's missing online play. It's just, it's not, yeah. No, but I remember when I did did start playing worms online, and that must have been either Armageddon or World Party, whenever it was. It was one of those two. There was a quietness to it. You know, there were the pauses and the waiting. And it wasn't as fun to me as when I was just playing against an AI opponent, funnily enough. Well, I, for me, I mean, now I still play Worms Armageddon on the PC online. And by the way, Worms Armageddon is frequently on sale on Steam

and Gog and Humble for like $3.5. So, like, $35 don't know. $3 to $5. It's definitely worth picking up on the PC. It's a game that still holds up. It still has an online community. It's only a tenor when it's not on sale. Still has patches. It still gets updates to this day.

But when I'm playing online against people now, we usually have a voice chat going in Discord because I'm usually playing with people I know. And when I'm playing on the Switch, and I have been playing a lot on the Switch since it came out on Thursday. Like you said, there is that quietness. But I kind of like that.

Like, one of the things, when I've given talks at like packs talking about why I think Worms is poised to be like it could be the gulf of e-sports because it's not as frantic and chaotic and immediate and fast as like Overwatch or Team Fortress 2 or you know Fortnite or whatever people are playing now this there's there is a there's a tempo to particularly Worms on again I think they lost with newer games um that really lends itself well to that kind of and he's lining up the swing and there he goes and that's a banana bomb

and three worms I've been brutally massacred Oh, I definitely would watch that Yeah, yeah I would actually watch that, yeah I've done local tournaments here in LA And people have a great time Like it's almost exclusive with people

Who've either never played before Or who haven't touched a worms game in years And it is so much fun To watch people play the game To talk about the game To commentate over the game Yeah, it's, it's some I don't want to be negative

because we've got a little bit more to cover um because i don't that's when you want to be negative you don't mean negative yeah save that the issue for me the problem with with armageddon and and ones when world party because world party was 2001 and look i know there are things that are different but it's the same it's it's basically the same world party was a big disappointment for me you know i i bought it thinking it was the next worms and it was the same yeah it wasn't so much for me because i didn't have armageddon i only had world parties so i was like here we go but the thing is i knew it was Armageddon, so it still was a bit of a disappointment

to that respect. But the problem for me with Worms Armageddon, I think the problem to some extent with Team 17 is they know they perfected it there, or they nailed it there, and there's nowhere to go, because if you add anything, you dilute it, and if you take anything away, you worsen it. And

I really don't think that after that they ever quite hit that again. I mean, I know that people were playing Worms 2 on Xbox Live Arcade and I know people were playing I want to say the one on the Wii people seem to quite like

I might be imagining that completely I don't know what was called No no sorry I'm not thinking of the Wii The second one on the PSP Open Warfare 2 they liked that as well The World Warfare 2 was great Particularly the DS version was great Because it was developed by

I forget the name of the studio But the same studio they did Tokitori A little game with a little positive game The Yellow Bird thing But they didn't just port, they didn't port the PSP version. They took the maps and everything. But the game engine underneath it is the Armageddon game engine. It's the same physics, same everything.

So the Worms Open Warfare 2 was, for the longest time, my favorite handheld worms game. Um, but following Armageddon and World Party, which I feel like it isn't worth going into extensive detail on, um, the series started for me, the series started for me, becoming a, a bit kind of like, oh, you're doing that now? Yeah. Because they'd absolutely nailed it and that you can't just go forward and keep making,

and keep re-releasing Armaged on a new format, even though I think people would probably have been, I mean, enthusiasts would have been okay with that. Yeah, but new players, or people who don't know what it is, aren't going to go and buy the 1998 one now, you know? Well, they will now, because the whole industry has changed, and the gamers have changed, but...

And it's been quite well. Yes, I hope. Hopefully. I do, I hope so. But they went 3D, didn't they? They had to go 3D. They had to make the worms into 3D worms. And everybody felt they had to do that at that time. I mean, I've heard people who love worms 3D and grew up with worms 3D. And it was the first one they played and they got really into it. But for me, I just saw worms in 3D and I just kind of went, well, this seems completely unnecessary. Because I was always, I mean, I was always this weird 2D guy anyway because of my bizarre jumping from master system to PlayStation 2 with basically nothing in between. But the

whole lot, I mean, I'm going to be completely frank, I've never played Worms 3D because I just didn't see the point, because I knew I wouldn't like it as much. I will say this. I will say this because I followed the development of Worms 3D. I was fascinated by how they were going to translate it to 3D. And the history of Worms 3D is fascinating

because after Armageddon came out and was a success, micropros later Hasbro Interactive really pressured Team 17 to make a 3D worms game and Team 17 said no we don't want to we don't think the technology is there yet we don't think we can do this in a way that makes it work

we want away and then Micropro said well we own worms now so we're just going to make a 3D worms game and then started working on a design document of their own and Team 17 my understanding and I may be wrong and if anyone wants to correct me on this, please do. My understanding is that Team 17 had to take them to court because Microprose thought they owned worms

and they didn't. They just owned the publishing rights for worms games. So it ends up we don't get... Microamachers. Yeah. So we don't get a 3D worms game in the 90s because Team 17 said no. It's not the time. We do get Hogs of War, which was published by Infragrames,

who had absorbed a lot of Haspro Interactive. And I had Rick Mail. which rigmail in the 90s is basically email but ugh okay so hogs of war comes out and it's but it's 3D worms it's not very good it's fine it's fine I played it I had a good time there was a PlayStation bundle

on the PS1 that had Worms Armageddon worms pinball and Hogs of War and nice shrink-wrapped infragrams labelling that was fine and then Team 17 decides now's the time to do worms in 3D and originally it was just somebody called Worms 3.

The listener, you can't see this, but David is yawning, and I'm assuming it is because Worms 3D is not the high point of the franchise. Originally, it was going to be published by Activision. Activision pulled out at some point, I think, because they probably wanted more creative control than Team 17 was willing to give

them. Worms 3D ended up being published in 2003 for the PC, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube in Europe by Sega. It was their first third-party published game. And it was eventually published in the US by a claim software, them guys what made BMXX, X,X, and then exploded. So 3D, 3D worms is voxel-based.

It is these kind of like chunky floating islands. And when you blow up a bit of an island, the terrain, it takes the damage. One of the things that 3D worms doesn't quite nail is one of my favorite things about worms, the 2D worms games, is when you hit a worm and you get this, it bumps into another worm. and it bumps into another worm, and it knocks a mine, and you get that kind of chain reaction of stuff, particularly like first-gen worms where you had maps like, you know, the Arctic and the alien where you had that kind of slipy, slidey friction. You could prod a worm off a ledge, and it would slide down a hill.

3D worms loses that, because you could have worms flying off in all directions, and so consequently you can fly in a direction and hit nothing. The same game engine was used for Worms for Mayhem in 2005, I want to say. I've heard better things about that one. It's a better game. It's a better game because as well as having those voxal objects and islands, it also has a hype map. Kind of like what Hogs of War did, except when you shoot part of the terrain, it lowers the hype map and also destroys parts or all of the voxel buildings nearby. Worms for Mayhem is not bad.

It's a better implementation of Worms in 3D than Worms 3D was. And later, both of those games got released and they got bundled together, bundled together, kind of combined into one title. and released on PS3, 360, and PC as Worms' Ultimate Mayhem. That's probably as good a 3D game as we're ever going to get for Worms. I don't think they're going to come back to it. And nor should they. I don't want to harp on it, but the thing for me with this is, like, adding 3D to Worms to me just struck me as like,

well, I mean, you're adding variables that just make everything more challenging, or at least it seems that way. so in order to make 3D work they're either going to have to make it exponentially more difficult or they're going to have to exponentially compromise it and either way you're going to lose the feel at least that's how it seems to me and also I remember 3D Lemmix

and yet here I stand among you today because 3D Lemmings is one of the worst games I've ever played in my entire life in terms of just like how can we balls this up harder than anyone's ever balls anything up before because that's what 3D Lemmings is to me

I think is also why I avoided 3D worms. It did, even though, you know, we're connecting the games perhaps more than they ought to be, but it left such a mark, just like the idea of taking a thing that's inherently a 2D game from the Amiga and turning into a 3D game on Windows. I was like, no, I don't need that. Notion of like, what works in 3D and what doesn't, and even without having played it, and I'm going to, you know, if it, maybe it's awesome, you know, but to me it just seems so like, Okay, Mario, I sort of, I can see how that would work in 3D.

Even Sonic, I can see how that would work in 3D. Conceptually. Conceptually, but it often didn't, as we've discussed, at length. But worms, a game where it's very much about your precise positioning in a space where avoiding vulnerability while also staying in the proper sight lines to hit enemies, to make difficult shots. Yeah. Where you can see most of the terrain at once, it just struck me as misguided.

Yeah, I think the biggest problem, the problem with 3D worms. 3D worms had an impact on the franchise going forward in a way that I think was detrimental. But the biggest one with 3D worms is it was basically a turn-based first-person shooter. And it didn't glom in the way that 2D worms had. It was funny and charming, but the 3D nature of it, everything's slower in Worms 3D. Like, the worm movements are slower because they are suddenly now they're mapped to 3D space. So the animations are very slow. The time between you finishing a go and then your worm saying stupid or oi nutter or whatever,

and then the next world, there are long pauses there. And a lot of that stuff carried over, even when they went back to doing 2D games, like Battlegrounds and Clan Wars and... revolution, the slow, because those games in particular were like 2.5D, it was a 2D game, but it was 3D graphics. They kept those same worm models, so the movement was very slow, and the tempo of Worms games kind of remained the same. Everything felt like is very slow and sluggish. And Worms WMD, which came out at this point eight years ago, that's the latest new mainline Worms game. And that was built on Armageddon as well, right?

That was built on the Armageddon source engine, source code, yeah. It's the first game in, at that point, a decade plus, that felt like it had the tempo of like Armageddon and Directors' cut in a way that other Worms games just kind of lost. Now, that's not that I'm, it's not to end on negative note, because I think we should wrap it up soon, but I think we should talk more about the anniversary edition, obviously, because that's the one that's just out. And I'll let you sort of lead on that as I have almost everything else, because you're much more knowledgeable than me. But I've only played it for about, as I mentioned, about 10 minutes, because I did ask for a code. And I feel a bit guilty now. Sorry, sorry, Team 17, because I wanted to talk about it. But Hank, the thing is, the thing is, here's what I feel I need to say about it. The digital, it's a digital eclipse joint that comes with Worms Armageddon for new novelty, the Game Boy Color version of

Worms Armageddon is included and it comes with one of their now traditional museum features which is a sort of mini museum it's three chapters long but it's exactly what you expect from Atari 50 or the Jeff Mentor story or the Karateka game it's the same thing and that's

if you've read my thing my gushing about that or you've heard my podcast where I got them on it and gushed at them about it which they did not appreciate it. I'm kidding. You will know how I feel about that. So all I needed to verify personally to justify this re-release was, does this feel like Worms Armageddon? And you know that meme, identifying would, yep, it's wood. That's what it was with this. Identifying Worms-Armageddon, yep, it's Worms-Zam-A-Den. Feels like Worms-Armogan, looks like Worms-O-Megan,

as far as I'm concerned, that that's all it needs to do, and it does. So they nailed it. It's a perfect port of Worms-Omagedon. It even uses one of the recent, it's It's not the latest PC version, but it's like one of the versions from like a couple of years prior. So it's a relatively recent build of Worms-Armageddon, working perfectly on console. I think there are some, I have some minor gripes with how it handles because the controls are very, it's very clearly like, it's like a joy to key situation where you have keyboard and mouse controls mapped to the controller. Like, as you would expect, like on the PS1 version of Worms-Omageddon, the right stick moves the map around. But then when you are using the homing missile,

You also use the right stick to move the mouse to point your cursor. The button to select for the left mouse is not the same button that you used to fire. So they have their separate mappings for fire and kind of selecting a target or selecting a weapons on the weapons panel. That's stuff I feel like could use some fine tuning. But on the whole, I like the controls. I've gotten used to the controls. I'm really good at the controls. I was literally, you know, wrecking shop online on the switch before we started recording.

It is a perfect port of Worms Armageddon. It is the best console port of Worms Armageddon to date. It knocks the N64 version, the Dream Plus version, the PS1 version's out of the water. It's got crossplay online, I think, at least across some form, that's right? A little bit. So if you have it on the Xbox 1 or the Xbox series, S&X, you can play against other Xbox. Right, right. You can't play Xbox versus PlayStation.

Yeah, PS4 and PS5. People can play against each other, but you can't do, like, Switch against Xbox or PS4 against Switch or, and it's not, it's in no way can it be connected to the PC version um i'm am i right in thinking sorry ben finish the i was just going to say i'm glad it didn't get a release on the pc because the museum stuff is great but

the stuff that you like you can't do custom maps and you can't do custom speech banks and there are too many features that you lose of this if you are a pc person but if you are a console person and your memory is playing armageddon on the dreamcast on the n64 on the you know game boy color or whatever this is

the version of worms as you remember it is it is the it is a perfect version of Worms Armageddon. It's brilliant. And that is what I was going to say. I was going to check, because I got the impression that this isn't a remaster. It doesn't look different. It's not. It's literally just, we've put

that game on the Switch, we've put that game on the PlayStation, and therefore, no, there isn't a PC release of this, is there? You just, if you want to play Worms Armageddon on, if people listening to this want to play it on their PC, they just buy Worms Armageddon. Yeah, if you've got a Fiver, you're good to go. Or if you know someone's got a job sold-out CDs.

I think it would be, I mean, I would like to see the museum content released on PC just for the completest sake. As a separate app, like we briefly talked about it beforehand, I think, before the podcast. Not that I need to mention that because it's completely alienating to the entire...

Showing off that you have private conversations. Yeah, but show you had a little conversation. There's no big deal. But, yeah, so one's up, basically the best ones game that has ever been made, your mileage may vary. Not director's cut, obviously. It's clearly director's cut.

The most prominent worms game, the most popular worms game, is now on everything. So you can go play it right now on the toilet on your switch. And that's great. You can be shit at worms while you shit on the, you know. You can shit out worms. Is there a mobile game that's exactly this? Not this. There is a, there's a version of Worms WMD that you can,

on your Android and iPhone now called Worms WMD Mobilised, and it's kind of a slightly stripped-down version of Worms WMD in the same way that when you bought Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy, it had like two of the characters missing. Like, there's a handful of weapons that didn't make the cup. This version's got Boggy B, but it hasn't got Spadge this one. Yeah, that's exactly it, yeah. So, yeah.

When is the Spadge update coming? Hashtag, release the Spadge Cup. Because it strikes me that Worms Armageddon, original, worms like Worms games done done properly or done normally there's no reason you wouldn't be able to play them on a mobile phone on a mobile phone

without you know like you wouldn't need to really do anything you can point and I might see if I can get Worms the director's cut working on my phone my favourite thing to do I use there's a so there's an app called Parsec which was originally kind of a remote

virtual gaming thing oh yeah yeah and now they use it they promote Unity bought it and they promote it as like a game dev tool. I use Parsec to let people remote into my PC to play Worms the Directors Cut with me. Because it's for a lot of people who I'm friends with who like Worms, it's usually their first time playing Directors cut. And it's through one of the emulators like Amiga. It's continuing to be the most accurate Amiga emulator out there.

I love the A500 Mini, but the version of Worms the Directors cut that's on there is a little limited. And it's also, it's emulated. It's like 95%. There's a couple of weird graphical things that are kind of quirks of the way that that build of UAE handles the Amiga or the engine chipset specifically. I guess in a way, like, again,

not wanting to be too negative here, but going sort of back to Armageddon for the anniversary makes sense to me. And I'm glad they did it. So this isn't me saying like, they're not doing a Sonic, they're not doing a Sonic mania and just going back to the well here.

They are re-releasing it on the anniversary. Yeah. But I do worry, like, where are they going to go from here with worms? Because everywhere seems wrong. They did Worms Rumble, which just, like... Worms Rumble was a very different game, though, isn't it? It's...

Well, here's the thing. People have wanted real-time worms since Worms came out. Real-time worms is an idea. I've been out. I'm not a big... I don't like the idea of real-time worms, but the community really wants real-time worms. So making a real-time Worms game is not a bad idea.

The problem was the... execution. Worms Rumble leans too hard and too heavy into the kind of, it's the fortnightification of video games, and Worms Rumble kind of leans so hard into that, to the point where it uses almost the same shade of purple in its menus. And there's a lot of design choices that don't

quite work, and it's a shame. Because conceptually, I don't hate it, but the execution is not great. And the idea, like, I think the idea of trying to make an e-sports friendly worms game is not a bad idea, but you don't do that by making something that is fundamentally not a Worms game. I think the next Worms game needs to, if you want to try to capture that esports audience, like I said, worms conceptually is perfectly poised to be the golf of e-sports.

You just need the right hook, you need the right tempo, because again, Worms Armageddon goes along at a good lick. WMD is almost there, but every other Worms game from the last 15 years, the tempo is off. and you need that for worms you need it to kind of like go along at a good lick and keep that tempo going and if they can nail that

if they can come up with a good hook for the game and they can nail the tempo the next worms game I genuinely believe could be perfectly poised to be the golf of e-sports I really believe that but they have to nail

war another classic jip gag there for you to round off the episode and round it off we will and I want to thank the both of you for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Thank very much for coming on.

Thanks, Jeffrey. It's all right. Ben, where can people find you on the internet where they wish to follow your doings? I'm on Blue Sky. I'm Ben Padden.com. I'm Ben Padden on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

I don't use it as much as I used to. I'm on Instagram. You wonder why. It's shocking. I'm on TikTok as A Ben Padden because Ben Padden was inexplicably taken. I would like to plug I do a sci-fi comedy audio drama series

If you're a Red Dwar fan If you're a Doctor Who fan It's kind of like those things smushed together With a little bit of sliders sprinkled on top Called Jump Leads We did our first season of six episodes last year We're currently in production on our second season We have some amazing cast members lined up

And also I think two of the episodes Are two of the best things I've ever written ever So that's coming up soon But listen to the first season online Just search for Jump Leads In your podcasting apparatus of preference or go to audio.jumpleads. Don't listen to that.

I'm very proud of it. And Dave, where can we find you on the internet? As if we don't know already. Exactly, they know me already. Basically, look for other Retronauts episodes with me on. They're quite good. But I'm from Sonic the Comic, the podcast, which is a fortnightly look at an old British comic

that was based on the Mega Drive games and not other stuff like all the other Sonic merchant spin-offs are based on. Our comics were based on the actual games. And we examine that every two weeks over at STCTP.com. And yes, you can also find me on, I'm on Blue Sky. That seems to be what I'm using the most Demon Tomato Dave.

I'm on X the Nothing app still as at Demon Tomato Dave, but I'm trying to phase that out. And I'm on Mastodon as well. And I'm not very good at listing the lengthy thing you have to say. Hang on, yes, I am. Speedlines.com.Stcdep.com. forward slash at Demon Tomato Dave. I think

that's right. Don't know how it works. Everyone, I mean, everyone is just going to go on the other ones. Not Mastodon, as has happened. And YouTube, YouTube, Demon Tomato Dave on YouTube. They're doing a whole job, and there's plenty of residual good videos that I made on there.

Dave's first game is good. Learning to settle. That's a good one. Go watch them. Yeah, they are very good, I have to say. And thank you very much again for listening to Retronauts. And if you enjoyed this episode, and you would like to give us some money for more episodes. You can do so for a mere $5 per month

over at patreon.com forward slash retronauts where just for $5, which is about less than half what it costs to buy one's Armageddon, unless it's on sale, in which case it probably is about $5. You will be able to get two full-length exclusive episodes every month to entire episodes that you'll only hear if you're on the Patreon, and none of the freeloaders will hear them. You know, they will suffer from not hear of.

them. They will not know what we're talking about. I want to. I've got FOMO. I keep seeing those little previews and going on I want to listen to the rest of it, but I'm too much of a skinflint. Yeah, he's just too tight. But also, you'll get early access to the weekly Monday episodes. For example, you'll be hearing this in the, well, in the future, I suppose.

Whereas again, the Freelows will be sitting around going, I don't wonder what's going to be the next episode. I don't know. All the cool people know already. I'm just kidding. I love you for your listeners. I really do love you. Please don't tell Jeremy that I said all these mean things about you. And you'll also get Diamond Fights excellent column this week in retro, which is also released as a podcast. And by this point, my new thing will probably be outwitched, but I don't know if it will, so I'm not going to say what it is. Hooray!

Even more stuff for you. And now comes the part where I have to end the episode, which I'm terrible at, so I will just do it in an incredibly perfunctory and lame way. It's over now. Bye. Thank you. We are the best we're the best, and we're the best, and we've come to win the war. We'll stand We'll never run Stay until it's done

Though our friends may fall And our world be blown apart We'll strike with all our might We'll fight for what is right We are worms We're the best And we've come to win the war We'll stand, we'll never run

We'll stay until it's done Though our friends may fall In our world be blown apart We'll strike with all our might We'll fight for what is right Till the end