Worms Armageddon
The popular (at least, amongst my friends) turn-based artillery game that ran in MS-DOS didn't stop at it's super-low resolution original. Though I never saw it for sale in stores and only ever got a copy because everyone had one somewhere on a floppy disk, like Lemmings and Wolfenstien; so I'm surprised it's sales were enough to bolster another game. Then again, that's how all the older PC titles started since most of them were free-ware or share-ware.
ANYWAY, after all the fun we had playing Worms, it was no question we were going to put some serious hours into it's sequel, Worms Armageddon. Armageddon, which was developed by the same Team 17 from the original, now ran on the Windows platform as well as Dreamcast and PlayStation. With that, it made a huge jump in graphical quality. What passed for worms in the first version was a hardly discernible mess of pixels. Now each worm was a neatly animated and designed clean little sprite with a large variety of animations for the wide array of possible actions.
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Alongside the graphical jump up in character quality of course was a huge jump up in the quality of the backgrounds, effects and audio. Levels could be more intricate as the images used to serve as your terrain could include a huge jump up in both resolution and could now contain up to 16-million colours instead of the previous 256.
All it's sillyness and strategic gameplay remained the same, and if anything grew to become much more solid. Meaning Worms Armageddon became one of those PC titles we sat around and played much more than some larger, higher budgeted titles. Plus, being turn-based meant we could include up to four players, which at the time was pretty rare.
Worms Armageddon is still widely available, both on PC through Steam and on mobile platforms like Android. Though I haven't played it since the 90's, I feel as if I wouldn't mind giving it a go on a touch-based platform. Then again, it would never be as much fun as it was playing alongside my friends in the past. All squished up against the same CRT computer screen.
ANYWAY, after all the fun we had playing Worms, it was no question we were going to put some serious hours into it's sequel, Worms Armageddon. Armageddon, which was developed by the same Team 17 from the original, now ran on the Windows platform as well as Dreamcast and PlayStation. With that, it made a huge jump in graphical quality. What passed for worms in the first version was a hardly discernible mess of pixels. Now each worm was a neatly animated and designed clean little sprite with a large variety of animations for the wide array of possible actions.
Alongside the graphical jump up in character quality of course was a huge jump up in the quality of the backgrounds, effects and audio. Levels could be more intricate as the images used to serve as your terrain could include a huge jump up in both resolution and could now contain up to 16-million colours instead of the previous 256.
All it's sillyness and strategic gameplay remained the same, and if anything grew to become much more solid. Meaning Worms Armageddon became one of those PC titles we sat around and played much more than some larger, higher budgeted titles. Plus, being turn-based meant we could include up to four players, which at the time was pretty rare.
Worms Armageddon is still widely available, both on PC through Steam and on mobile platforms like Android. Though I haven't played it since the 90's, I feel as if I wouldn't mind giving it a go on a touch-based platform. Then again, it would never be as much fun as it was playing alongside my friends in the past. All squished up against the same CRT computer screen.
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