Earthworm Jim was definitely one of those concepts that you had to be around at the time to appreciate. Back in 1994, all you needed to dazzle people was a fluid animation of a character climbing a ledge for people to think your production was the real deal. Who cares if there’s a lack of cohesion within the universe’s design; look at the way light shimmers off your gun! And maybe Earthworm Jim was a token case of graphics over gameplay. I loved this franchise as a youngin. The cartoon was vastly underrated in my eyes; a successful blend of Animaniacs with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What rare Youtube clips exist are well worth perusing through.
My heart was kind of broken when I played the Genesis version of Earthworm Jim on the Wii Virtual Console, and had to contend with all of that game’s flaws. The levels were difficult, there was no battery save, the Tommy Tallarico soundtrack was muffled, and the game wasn’t the brilliant glory of random insanity that I remembered. So the people at Gameloft went and created this HD-update for people like me who’s selective memory transformed the original Earthworm Jim game into something better than it really was. The cleaner visuals amplify the smooth, mostly-organic animations. The audio soundtrack is as brilliant as it was the first two-hundred times people heard it on Electric Playground. You can conserve Plasma Bullets and save them for tricky moments instead of being forced to use them on the next victim because the Sega Genesis controller was ill-equipped to have a weapon-switching button. Game progress is now saved and you can revisit levels at your leisure. There’s a minor annoyance but you have to revoke your game progress should you opt to play on a new difficulty. And I don’t think the cheat codes work anymore, but you shouldn’t really need them anymore now that the game (FINALLY) has a level save. And best I can tell, the “Who Turned Out The Lights” bonus level has vanished, not that too many people knew it existed in the first place. And it perhaps lent little to the overall game experience besides providing a possible visual appearance by a Grue. But aside from that, this HD-polishing succeeds in making Earthworm Jim fun again.
Whether or not you’ll find Earthworm Jim fun in the first place will depend on a few variables. Like if you were a fan of Earthworm Jim to begin with. Or perhaps if you had a flair for the absurd. The only in-game plot comprises of a new-for-2010 comic strip explaining Jim’s origin story and the message “rescue the princess like every hero in the 80s-90s does so get to it boy.” The game has a decided lack of story or even context. Why Earthworm Jim is visiting a junkyard planet or underwater base or giant intestines is never explained other than because people in the 90s did not care for these details. The game’s sense of humor is something of a mixed bag. There are plenty of bodily fluids, as kids in the 90s loved their creepy crawlies and Nickelodeon wackiness. There are also moments of sly charm, like the boss fight with a goldfish or the Hell level’s soundtrack flip-flopping from Night on Bald Mountain to elevator music. And there’s a more-relevant-than-ever-before battle with an armed and dangerous Robot Chicken.
The lynchpin to your enjoyment is your ability to handle Earthworm Jim is your ability to handle the gameplay. You will need to convince yourself that you are not playing Contra, or Doom, or Halo, or Gears or whatever health-regenerating mega action game you are used to. Jim stands perfectly still while firing his mega machine gun of excessive death, striking the most dramatic action hero pose an Earthworm can strike. Players will have to undergo a slightly uncomfortable learning curve of figuring out what platforms can be climbed, walked, jumped on and/or are capable of retaliating with electric shock.
The game does make a few modifications to tone down the difficulty. On the standard difficulty settings, bosses now have a health bar. “A logical addition”, I thought. Less logical is the window that pops up explaining outright how to defeat the foe you are about to face. “An insulting addition”, I thought. While having easier difficulty settings below the “Original” difficulty will make certain segments more humane, they do little to curb the extreme frustration of the underwater tube race sprint in a submarine made of glass. Or protecting your bromate Peter Puppy from aliens and meteor storms, lest he transform into angry puppy mode and devour your torso. The hardest parts of Earthworm Jim 1 have not relented much in their cruelty.
The game has some new content, but they aren’t particularly noteworthy. Three new levels with a computer-chip theme culminate in three different bosses. None of these areas are particularly interesting, but the game loses many, many bonus points for pitting the player against… a keyboard-playing cat. There needs be a ban on internet memes appearing in commercial video game product. There’s also an online four player co-op mode that also leans on underwhelming. The levels merely reuse all assets from the campaign and throws in a bunch of contrived “players must help each other to hit these switches” moments. Plus, hardly anyone is playing online. The game’s most noteworthy feature is a sweet supersuit wardrobe that you can unlock for your Xbox avatar. As far as I’m concerned, I got my money’s worth on that.
Admittedly, Earthworm Jim is something of an acquired taste. An acquired taste rife with boogers, farts and stomach acid, but it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing people visiting this site has seen eaten. Longstanding fans would do well to pick up what may as well be the definitive version of this weird-smelling-but-still-seminal classic. And I would like to see this game succeed, if just to see Earthworm Jim 2 get an HD makeover. And Earthworm Jim 3 get an extreme makeover.
3 ½ stars
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