Has Earthworm Jim aged well?
No. Once upon a time I was going to do a video about this, I don't know if it's the right time for a video about Earthworm Jim.
Earthworm Jim is a victim of a lot of things. A lot of Shiny was born out of Virgin Games, right. Guys who worked on Disney games like Aladdin for the Genesis.
Some of those Virgin Games guys have been very forthcoming about the culture back then -- about the rental market being this big scary boogeyman. So developers would deliberately insert difficulty spikes in to their games. Things that were arbitrarily SUPER difficult, just to stump players who were on a rental, to make sure they couldn't finish the game in a weekend.
Because that's how you added length to a game back then. You just made it harder. The harder the game, the longer it took to finish. Once you realize this, it unlocks a lot about why older games were "Nintendo hard." (Sakurai very recently touched on this!)
Earthworm Jim has the unfortunate position of being one of those games. There's a very specific level -- the "Tube Race" segment -- that feels like it was added as one of those rental-blocking difficulty spikes. The idea is that you've been in this underwater facility for a while and there's a glass submarine you can pilot. Since its glass, bumping in to walls cracks it, and too much damage will cause it to implode and kill you. You also have an oxygen meter you have to refill too.
You play a pretty normal level that's a mixture of fighting enemies in the base with a couple of simple submarine segments. Where the level would normally just end, you get this Tube Race segment, which is one very, very, very long submarine maze where you have a minute and a half to make it to the end without running out of oxygen or damaging the submarine so badly that you die. It is ten times harder than everything to come before it, and one of the hardest parts overall.
But that's not enough to spoil the game, no. Earthworm Jim in general is also just... one of those games that is so in love with its own artwork that it kind of hurts the experience. It's one of those games where the animation and the jokes and the character comes before everything else, even at the cost of gameplay.
Video games have something called a "hitbox." Basically, what you see is not what the game actually understands as being your character. When you see this:
What the game is seeing is this:
These are the hitboxes around characters in video games. If blue touches green, that's a floor. If blue touches red, take damage. If blue touches purple, instantly kill the player. If blue touches yellow from below, grant item. That's how the game logic works.
And you may notice that a lot of early games have characters that very easily fit in to a square for this very reason.
From a technical standpoint and a player standpoint, it is extremely easy to read when and how things collide with each other.
Earthworm Jim (and to a lesser extent, Aladdin) is a game that says "Screw that! We've got REAL CARTOON ANIMATION!" And that's the priority: showing off the animation. Not playing well.
What are the hitboxes here?
In practice, it shakes out to something like this. There's no clear line to denote what you can stand on, because the background is drawn like a cartoon show, where characters are placed in a kind of slightly angled view, inside of the floor.
There are margins of empty air on everything -- Earthworm Jim can overlap objects and not actually touch them, and the same happens in reverse. That rigid, readable collision detection from games like Mega Man and Mario don't apply here. There's a little bit of guesswork in every action Jim takes.
Now, of course, with the advent of polygons, a lot of games have more vague hitboxes. It's harder to judge what is touching what, and we've developed a better sense for it, so maybe it's not that important, right?
Well, yes and no. Earthworm Jim was trying to show off, you see. It was one of the first games of its type. It's not doing this because it's a better way of handling collision detection (it isn't), it's doing it because it's trying to look flashy. It's trying to impress you. And that's all its using it for. It is deliberately and intentionally putting itself at a disadvantage in order to say "this is an interactive cartoon."
That thinking sabotages the entire game. I can guarantee almost every idea in Earthworm Jim started with pitching the characters and how they animate with the gameplay being left as the final afterthought. To Earthworm Jim's credit, it's not a total disaster, it's just very loose and unbalanced.
Do you remember The Order: 1886 for the Playstation 4? It was lauded for having beautiful graphics, but in practice there wasn't a whole lot else. It was more like a 5 hour QTE. A lot of great tech and incredible visuals, but not a lot of deep or engaging gameplay.
That is exactly what Earthworm Jim was in 1994. Except in Earthworm Jim was beloved, because nothing really looked or sounded like it did. Aladdin was a big deal for Sega, but Earthworm Jim was a clear and definitive next step, and it was on everything.
Nowadays, after a lot of its more technical ideas have been better solved, its problems stick out more, and more, and more. It's not unplayable (that right is reserved for Earthworm Jim 2), but it isn't great.
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