

Worms is highly replayable by its very nature, but don’t come in expecting a structured experience for the solo player. Yes, the experience will likely be better on Evercade VS - part of the fun of Worms is seeing your friends’ reactions to that awesome turn you just had - but for quick, impromptu Worms sessions, this is great. Even better, the fact that the game has always supported “pass and play” rather than requiring one controller for each player means that you can play this game with friends using just the Evercade handheld. Worms’ core gameplay shines as it always has, though, and in many ways the simplicity of this version makes it an excellent pick-up-and-play option for when you just fancy a quick game but don’t want to faff around setting things up. You can rename all the teams, but only have a limited number of them in total you can turn on and off weapons, but not save them as game schemes to return to later and you have no control over the generated landscapes. The Mega Drive version of Worms is relatively bare-bones in that there’s none of the single-player content from the home computers’ later Reinforcements expansion pack, and the amount of customisation you can apply to the game is fairly limited. But for now while there are more readily accessible (and licensable) console versions of games out there, those are the versions we’re more likely to see on Evercade.

These aren’t insurmountable obstacles and I don’t doubt we will one day see things like MS-DOS, C64, ZX Spectrum and Amiga games on the Evercade. There are numerous potential complications when emulating a computer rather than a console - most notably some systems’ requirement for BIOS ROMs, which are often copyrighted, as well as the fact controls tend to be built for keyboard rather than controller. The reason for this is that we don’t yet have any MS-DOS (or indeed home computer in general) emulation on any Evercade cartridges. Worms is where it all began - though the version of Worms we get on the Evercade cartridge is the Mega Drive console version rather than the original original PC version.


Taking control of each member of a team of heavily armed worms a turn at a time, you can move around the randomly generated landscape, fire or throw weapons at your opponents and do your best to have the last worm standing. The Worms series, for the unfamiliar, is a long-running range of games that are primarily turn-based strategy titles based loosely on the classic “artillery” titles for home computers.
