So I was going to play *Hedgewars*, which is a free and open source clone of Worms. But before playing it, I wanted to see the original experience, just as a comparison. So the game I chose to play was...
It's Worms! The silly tactics game where your team of worms has to kill the other team of worms, in a destructible 2D envrironment, using wacky weapons. *Worms Armageddon* is supposedly the most "classic" version, released in 1999, but interestingly enough, it still receives online updates to this day. It's maintained by some community members, and the latest official patch was released in 2020 - with a cult following like that, it has to be pretty good!
The game's two big components are the singleplayer campaign, and the multiplayer. *The singleplayer mode was surprisingly fun!* Well, the AI is pretty bad, but the game makes up for it with clever level design with fun challenges. When you're dealing with "primitive" AI, games become very asymmetrical - but Worms Armageddon takes full advantage of it - the campaign levels often handicap you, or give you more interesting objectives to reach. Overall, I had fun, but as with any older game, there were frustrating moments for sure. On the other hand, *the multiplayer mode is very intimidating*: it's always scary to join an online match against people who've played the same game for 20 years. I ended up quitting before I even started my first match... Overall, *7/10*, which was better than I expected a 90s Worms game to be.
This one was interesting - the PC version is only available for Windows, but it's been updated specifically to work with Wine. In fact, *the game detected that I was running on Wine/Linux*, and applied some settings to improve compatibility. That's very nice of them! *And, despite all the updates, at it's core this game is still pretty ancient, so it's totally fine to play it on ancient hardware!*
