Features
- Six levels
- Only for Game Boy Advance
The story is extremely bizarre in characters and storyline, but all you really need to know is this: you're an earthworm in a kickass supersuit, and you're out to blast a little bad-guy hiney. You'll have to run, jump, bounce, and whip through the game's six levels, blasting any enemy that gets in your way. Though some levels are very traditional platformer-style designs, some are very clever original creations...like a bungee-jumping competition against a ball of snot, or a level where you have to whip a very cute puppy across chasms and over enemies. The game has a lot of variety, both in looks and in gameplay, and what's more, Earthworm Jim is extremely challenging to play.
Earthworm Jim's original charm, apart from the totally whacked-out concept and setting, is its use of handdrawn art for its game level assets. Everything is drawn and made to look like a cartoon-style feature, using cel animation and handpainted backgrounds. The game looked really slick on the SNES and Genesis back in its day, and on the Game Boy Advance it's almost as impressive. Almost, since the portable version seems to have a few frames missing in several animation sequences, and the timing in the character's jump, helicopter spin, headwhip, gun fire, and idle stand-still motions just don't have the same humor as when it was on the consoles.
Most of the game's assets have been lifted from the SNES version, including the audio soundtrack. Shin'en, the team responsible for tunage in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 converted the background music from the console with really great results. The Game Boy Advance doesn't have as powerful sound hardware as the Super NES, but the portable's audio tracks sound much better than the music in the original Genesis version.
My biggest beef with Earthworm Jim is the decision to not include any sort of progressive save, and it's this that hurts the game most of all. The original version didn't have any continues other than the ones awarded throughout the levels, but that was on the console where gamers can pause the game and walk away for as long as they want. The Game Boy Advance needs at least a password system so you can turn off the game after a play session to rest your eyes or conserve the batteries. Let this be a lesson to other teams working on SNES-to-GBA conversions -- players need to rest. Give them a battery to save the game in progress.