Once upon a time, there was a worm....

Possibly the weirdest, wackiest and most insane video game series' of all time (and certainly one of the grooviest), Earthworm Jim's games have introduced game players (and, briefly, cartoon watchers) to some of the strangest sci-fi environments ever, ranging from the Muzak-ridden circles of Heck, to the "TexMex that Time Forgot" in Jim's own warped mind.

The story begins with an Earthworm....named Jim, mind you....who was just minding his own business when a super suit fell on him from above. Mutated by the suit, Jim found himself with amazing strength, speech, a small handgun, and enough intelligence to use them all. Unfortunately, the suit had just fallen from the spaceship of Professor Monkey-For-A-Head (the suit's creator) in a battle against the evil bounty hunter Psy-Crow. Needless to say, Psy-Crow and Professor Monkey-For-A-Head decide to get the suit back. That alone would be challenging enough were it not for the other supervillains of the Galaxy (Evil The Cat, Doc Duodenum, Bob The Goldfish, and Queen Slug-For-A-Butt to name a few) who also want the suit for their own ends.

And Jim? He just wants to rescue the beautiful Princess Whats-Her-Name.

	The Games

It is widely believed that there are three existing Earthworm Jim games, though each has existed in a number of forms and styles, showing up on a variety of game systems.

Earthworm Jim's first game was your generic run/jump/shoot game of its time, with enough originality to seperate it from the pack. The gameplay pretty much went as follows: Earthworm Jim finds himself in a new planet/level (such as New Junk City, Planet Heck, or the dangerous homeworld of a seemingly mild-mannered puppy dog), which would usually end with a boss of some sort. On leaving the planet, Jim would find himself in a race through hyperspace against the evil PsyCrow, avoiding all of the asteroids in his path. If Jim loses the race, he must battle PsyCrow before entering the next level. Best advice for this game? Don't lose to PsyCrow, and watch out for falling cows. Earthworm Jim 2 made it clear that Jim's arch-enemy would be Psy-Crow despite the tenacity of villains like Evil The Cat and Bob The Goldfish. As bait to catch Jim, Psy-Crow has kidnapped the beautiful Princess Whats-Her-Name and has made sure that the path leads that Jim must travel is filled with destruction, madness, and the chance for Jim to dress up as a sea creature for an audience's amusement. This game felt similar to the first Earthworm Jim game, but more than anything else it seemed like it was a challenge excercise for the programmers, as every level seems to feature some concept or design that makes the level stand out (such as the ability to take dirt from the ceiling and make the floor higher in the "Lorenzo's Soil" level).

Earthwom Jim 3-D takes an odd turn from the usual sci-fi/space odyssey feel of the previous games. For one thing, the gameplay has been changed from the run/jump/shoot style of games like Donkey Kong Country, and has been replaced with a more Exploratory style, such as with Mario 64. Second, instead of being in outer space, Earthworm Jim finds himself trapped in his own mind after a cow fell from the sky and hit him on the head. Four notorious supervillains (Psy-Crow, Fatty Roswell¹, Professor Monkey-For-A-Head, and Bob The Goldfish) have taken this opportunity to invade Jim's mind and try to push him irrevocably over the brink of insanity! As this isn't such a hard brink to push Jim over, he naturally has to fight back by going from Super Hero to Super Ego. Collecting all the marbles that he's lost (100 in every level) and finding the mystical Golden Udders², Jim must confront each of the four villains in a respective quadrant of his brain: Memory (during a War that Jim barely remembers from before his mutation), Happiness (worlds filled with every kind of fast-food imaginable), Fear (Haunted Houses, graveyards, and a Disco), and Fantasy (the Wild West). This game was not received as well by the fans (probably due to the camera's Kamikaze-like mission to kill you), but for those who were willing to get used to the gameplay it was found to be a worthy continuation of the Earthworm Jim series.

	And the rest....

It's worth mentioning that Earthworm Jim briefly had a Warner Brothers' cartoon, released at about the same time as another wacky cartoon, Freakazoid!. Both of these cartoons were cancelled well before their time.