Features
- Nine levels
- Password save
- Only for Game Boy Advance
Basically, Jim needs to wander through these weird locations, hopping from platform to platform, blasting enemies with his gun or whipping them with his worm body. He can climb ledges, and swing like Tarzan or parachute to safety using the booger dude that's in his backpack. Levels require some thought and technique...like the challenge where you have to carry cows from one location to the barn without getting them abducted. Or the level where you have to keep Peter Puppy's pals bouncing on a giant marshmallow. There are definitely some clever ideas in Earthworm Jim 2.
When done correctly, Earthworm Jim 2 is a solid game and a lot of fun. We've had versions for the Genesis, Super NES, Saturn...and I believe even the PlayStation was going to get the game before Sony turned it down because of its 2D-ness. So the developer who was assigned the task of bringing the game to the GBA had a lot of reference.
I'm not going to speculate on what happened at the development studio responsible for this shoddy port, but man...Earthworm Jim 2 on the Game Boy Advance is so sloppy it almost waters the eyes watching the game move on the LCD screen. Majesco's first Earthworm Jim effort on the Game Boy Advance, released as a launch title almost exactly a year ago, wasn't perfect, either, but at least it wasn't as unbalanced and bug-filled as this production. Jumping is definitely not as fluid as the original Earthworm Jim 2 on the consoles...his hyper jump/fall animation makes it difficult for players to pull off Jim's important "booger whip" move. Enemy sprites and objects seem to glitch all over the place in spots throughout the game. The action tends to slowdown in the most unlikely locations, killing the game's pace...and the gameplay's inconsistent, with some ledges that can be climbed upon, but others, identical in looks, that cannot. The GBA version of Earthworm Jim 2 even dishes out level passwords that either don't work at all, or load a game where you instantly die for no apparent reason. Beta-testing? What's that?
To its credit, the development team managed to get more frames of animation into the sequel than the previous developer did with the original game for the GBA. But that doesn't help when the game moves so inconsistently that it's almost unbearable to watch. The soundtrack has also been sandwiched down into near inaudible muffles, which is unfortunate considering the music translation was one of the highpoints of the original GBA game's development.