Fat Worm Blows A Sparky Review

You have got to love literal video game titles… Although some of the immediately make you wonder if the games in question actually can be something real… At least this one is. And it’s indeed, and partially, about a fat worm blowing sparks.

STORY

What a fate for the titular worm – It has ended up inside the circuits of a ZX Spectrum and has to survive attacks from what would be predecessors to malware or computer viruses. (Although they do look like bugs.) The mission is to fight the menace using burps and sparks (No, not farts.) while trying to locate fifty Spindles. You begin with merely twenty Sparkies (The burps and sparks combined.), but collecting the Spindles re-fills your defenses. And when you have retrieved all Spindles, you have to look for a disk drive with which you will be able to clone yourself. (To ensure your survival and future, I guess.)

But can a simple worm find true happiness inside a Speccy…? This is another game that obviously asks the big questions. (While being entertaining, of course.)

THE GAME

The worm floats around a four-way scrolling maze-like map consisting of corridors, walls, ramps, platforms, data-lines, etc. It could definitely be an avant-gardistic representation of the interior design of the Spectrum. Bumping into the walls doesn’t harm the worm and neither does falling off ramps, but you’d be right if you guessed that there are beings that will try to eradicate the peaceful and not even particularly squirmy protagonist.

These beings are called “Creepers” and “Crawlers”. The Creepers stalk the wormie in flying vessels known as “Sputniks” while the Crawlers (on the surface) chase and attach themselves to the worm. These can’t be shaken off unless you sail beneath the so-called “Debugger” somewhere in the maze. (This looks like striped rectangle.) Four Crawlers is enough to kill the worm, but they can be eliminated with the sparks. (Before they latch onto you, that is.) The Creepers in the Sputniks can be taken out with the burps as they work like jumping “landmines”. (With a limited vertical range.) Meaning, that if a Sputnik flies over a placed burp, it will get hit from below. (Unless the Sputnik happens to be too high up.) To reach some of the Spindles, you need to access some tricky locations. (Often via the data-buses of the motherboard.)

CONTENT

Does it all sound confusing yet? It shouldn’t, really – Fat Worm Blows A Sparky is basically a Collect ‘Em-Up where you navigate around a maze. And you have two types of enemies that are killed with two different weapons. (And let’s not forget – You can run out of ammo.)

The game takes place on a single level that is of decent size. Collecting 50 Spindles will take quite a while even if they can be retrieved in any order. On screen, you have the gameplay area on the top two thirds of the screen and two panels on the lower third part. The left panel is a scrolling overhead map of the closest surroundings. The map displays corridors, walls, and data-buses along with the Spindles. (These are shown as white dots.) The map doesn’t show where the ascendable ramps are, so it’s best used for locating the Spindles and for finding your way out of dead ends. (Not that there are that many.) Two of the corridors also have warp zones which teleport you to another part of the map.

The right panel displays the number of Sparkies you have left, the number of Spindles you have collected, My-score (Current score in game.), and Hi-score. (That would be “today’s” best.)

CONTROLS

The main menu has two options: “1 Redefine Keys” or “2 Kempston Joystick”. (For the ZX Interface II and other key-mapped Joysticks, you select option “1”.)

The “Key Redefiner” selects keys for Burper, Blaster, Faster, Slower, Lefter, Righter, Bouncer, and Aborter. “Faster” and “Slower” are for increasing and decreasing the worm’s speed while “Lefter” and “Righter” are for turning / changing direction. “Bouncer” brings up a little “Demo” of a bouncing, striped “Amiga”-ball, and “Aborter” quits the game. Punch the Space-key to select between the different operations, and Enter for choosing a key.

Keyboard controls are highly recommended as the worm controls “like” a car in certain racing games. (I always think of Super Sprint for some odd reason.) And you need two keys for the sparks and burps. Either way, the controls feel really good and fluid.

GRAPHICS

When you start the game, you’ll immediately notice how smooth the movement of the worm is. It’s pretty serene swimming around the corridors… For a few moments! And that’s until you’re targeted by those goddamn Sputniks and Crawlers… It’s a good thing you can accelerate and make nice turns… And you’ll also notice that the game actually is in three dimensions and uses vector-graphics for everything. (Including the worm.)

The camera follows the worm from above, and the point of view is far away enough so that it’s easy to see sides of any walls and, e.g., entrances to corridors and moving platforms. It looks smooth as all hell. When you move up or down the ramps, the worm gets closer to or farther away from the camera. The worm also grows longer and thinner when it goes fast and, likewise, shrinks and gets fatter when it stops.

In other words: Fat Worm Blows A Sparky has a nice, fully functional 3D-engine.

SOUND

When that title-screen tune starts playing, you realize, for the 3000th time (At least.) that the 48K Spectrum’s sound capabilities didn’t have one single thing advantage over the SID-chip… The tune howls like an ambulance siren trying to play some music and… It doesn’t get more charming as it repeats every time you visit the title screen… Or maybe it does… One microscopic bit… It’s highly memorable, though. (Unfortunately not for all the right reasons.) Thankfully, the music doesn’t play in-game, because that would’ve been pure torture. Instead, the game has a few but functional effects.

Honestly, it doesn’t really need that much else, because once you master the elegant swimming of the worm, you’ll probably concentrate more on trying to get around the relatively intricate interiors of the Speccy rather than swear over any missing spectacular sound effects.

SUMMARY

Fat Worm Blows A Sparky is an interesting experiment in both visual design and gameplay. With the title to match such an original game, it most likely stuck out on the shelf in any store it was sold at. Some may have turned interested in it immediately while others might have disregarded it as another weird game without real merits… And a game that of course had to be exclusive for the Spectrum.

The slightly metaphysical aspect of the game is an additional humorous touch – The notion that there is a worm in the computer that’s depicted in the game ON the physical computer… But the fact remains – This was a realized idea that happened to work flawlessly. A very playable game that also is very well programmed. The graphical three-dimensional rendering of the game’s microcosm was both original and ahead of its time. I can’t imagine there being too many games that have had Julian Todd’s game as its main inspiration. Nowadays, “everybody” could make a similar game in a free 3D-engine, but that wouldn’t be one tiny fragment as impressive as the fat worm that blew Sparkies.

Durell Software was on a roll around this time (1985), and published a whole bunch of impressive and original titles with a high playability. Titles like Thanatos, the “Saboteur”-games, Turbo Esprit, and so on. All of them were very important when it came to establishing Durell both on the market and in the hearts of video game players. Fat Worm Blows A Sparky easily fits in that category as well.

Developed by: Julian G. Todd
Published by: Durell Software
Version Reviewed: ZX Spectrum 48K
Genre: Maze
Players: 1
Also Available On: N/A
Released: 1986