Earthworm Jim: Wacky Wormy Whipping

Here’s a controversial opinion: I don’t like Earthworm Jim. In fact, it turns out that I hate it. Which is weird since at first sight there’s a lot to love, but as the saying goes, looks can be very deceiving. Most reviews back in 1994 were raving and especially highlighted the funny and twisted environment our little earthworm called Jim walks around in. I don’t especially love the character: it could just as well be Boogerman—at least that snotty nineties console platformer behaves like a proper platformer.

In Earthworm Jim, you… launch cows using fridges, zap dogs and ghosts, fight a cat that has nine lives and try to outrace yet another weird antagonist? All these heroic actions require a fitting hero costume. The fist time that Jim jumped out of it was a genuinely cool experience, and the fact that you can whip enemies with your wormy head certainly is funny. I have no idea what the central theme is here, it felt like the developers just threw together a bunch of random crazy ideas and backdrops for levels.

As soon as you start navigating those levels, the problems start to appear. You will notice Jim likes bumping into yet-invisible obstacles as you move Earthworm Jim to the edges of the screen. The resolution/screen estate relative to the quite large bitmap of Jim almost feels like playing one of the reduced Donkey Kong Land games on the Game Boy. I’ve read that this is especially bad on the SNES version¹ I played but I tried the MegaDrive one and watched a few videos on the DOS one and can’t find a huge difference. The game clearly nudges you towards memorizing enemy and obstacle locations and I strongly dislike that mechanic for such a game. This is not the eighties or early nineties any more: in 1994, Super Mario World, the prime example on how to do 2D platforming, was already four years old.

In the fire level (lovingly called “What The Heck?”), things take another turn for the worse. I can’t see where the damaging fire pits are because everything is fiery red. Some of the ramps make Jim slide so fast that I don’t know what’s happening and end up in a pit. Is this Sonic? When I try to land a jump I end up in spikes that I thought were part of the background decoration. The funny lawyers bullying you with their paperwork for enemies did not help brighten up the day, nor do the green emeralds that act as elevators when you run on them in the reverse order as I kept falling off these damn things.

In-between these levels you’re treated with a race sub-level that feels like a Sonic 2 bonus stage rip-off. But they only copied the bad parts. I wasn’t particularly good at it but it was a bonus stage so that didn’t matter, while here, if you lose the race, you’re suddenly facing a difficult boss with almost zero HP because of course that does not replenish. It doesn’t at the start of any level either. And since most levels look completely different, the first thing you do is try to orientate and discriminate between potential harmful thing and friendly platform thing—mostly in vein, as that thing that hits you will be your death. Again. No continues any more? Oh sorry, here’s the title screen again!

The frustration does not end there: Jim’s slippery behaviour also cost me lives, as did the awkward controls to turn his head into a helicopter (cool!) by repeatedly jamming that same jump button while also jumping? (not cool). A minor complaint then: how about the fact that picking up a power-up for your gun forces you to use it resulting in wasted shots.

I’m doing my best to try and come up with some good ideas but besides the colourful graphic work and the great soundtrack there’s surprisingly little. Which is a big shame as Shiny Entertainment created some really cool and original games including Sacrifice. I was especially surprised to learn that the founder, David Perry, also worked with Virgin on classic nineties platformer games like Aladdin which I love. There are (almost) zero cheap pitfalls that have the exact same colour palette as the background in Aladdin. Aladdin is not a little slippery bugger prone to falling off cliffs. Aladdin does not like living on the edge (literally). You’d have thought that these good design principles would also make it into this game, but no.

When carefully inspecting reviews of the game you will start to notice a pattern: people praise the brilliance of the originality compared to the flood of typical Mario clones (ok), the beautiful bright graphics (true), and the amazing soundtrack laid out by Mark Miller who did a lot of cool stuff including Gex: Enter the Gecko and Pandemonium!. Then reviewers note a few minor hiccups such as the actual gameplay, only to end in a superb score. But wait, isn’t the gameplay the core of the, you know, “game”? There were plenty of big console hitters in 1994—including Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, and Sonic 3—that did know how to do platforming.

Perhaps this worm should have stayed in the can.