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Earthworm Jim was the brilliant but troubled brainchild of several very talented, very weird people at Shiny Entertainment, during the days of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It was a platformer at its core, but it was also a shooter, a racing game, and a competitive bungee jumping sim, depending on the level.
It seems as though everyone who worked on Earthworm Jim had an idea that they wanted to put into the game, and no matter how incongruous it was, the team at Shiny did its best to put it into the final product. That’s the way I picture it happening, anyway.
The result was a game that was much greater than the sum of its parts. For all of its weaknesses, Earthworm Jim offered solid platforming action bridged by bizarre non-sequiturs. A cow is launched with a refrigerator. Hell (or “heck”) is ruled by a demonic cat with nine lives. The boss at the end of one of the game’s most difficult levels is revealed to be a goldfish, who is anticlimactically killed when Jim rushes into the room and knocks over his bowl. At times, the game seemed like one big inside joke.
Gameloft’s remake botches the punchline.
The flawed virtual control pad setup is here in full force, and it does its best to ruin as much of the experience as possible. Fortunately, in an attempt to minimize the inevitible d-pad frustration, the game has been made much easier. Jim starts with ten lives. His gun auto-aims. If you pick the easiest difficulty level, you’ll take dozens of hits before losing a life, and you’ll get hints and tips throughout each level to ensure that you’ll never get lost or stuck.
I was even able to beat that damned bathosphere level on my first try. That says something.
The reworked gameplay introduces a new set of game-breaking issues, though. At many points in the game, you’ll need to jump and then trigger the whip at the top of your leap, to swing off of a hook. Performing this action with one thumb is impossible. You’ll never reach the full height of your jump before swinging the whip. The only solution is to move your left thumb over to the right side of the screen, so that you can trigger both buttons at once. In earlier levels, it’s a minor frustration. Later on, it makes the game almost unplayable.
Other segments, meanwhile, have been watered down so much that they no longer serve any purpose. Take the Andy Asteroids bonus levels, for instance. In the iPhone version of Earthworm Jim, you can no longer die after hitting too many asteroids, and there’s no need to collect 50 orbs to earn a continue, because the game supplies infinite continues. What was once an lightweight but involving break from the action is now completely pointless and no fun at all to play, thanks to a twitchy tilt-based control scheme.
I might be able to overlook Earthworm Jim’s many issues if its sense of humor had arrived intact. After all, the original game was certainly no masterpiece in terms of gameplay, but its humor and personality made it a personal favorite. Unfortunately, much of this humor didn’t survive the trip to the iPhone. The rerecorded sound effects and music lack the comedic punch they once had. Jim’s new voice is terrible. And there’s just something off-putting about the smoothed-over graphics.
Without its trademark humor or a sense of purpose to its gameplay, Earthworm Jim is nothing more than a disjointed, occasionally frustrating platformer. And now, it also has bad controls.
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