Image by Deviantart-ist trebeck.

As we gametastic veterans know (unless we don’t, in which case propel your visual circuits at the impending knowledge-facts and thou shalt know), Earthworm Jim was elevated from revolting nigh-blind squelching abomination to crotch-shooting action hero when a Super Suit fell from the sky. Once he’d ensconced his grotesque body inside it, a whole revelatory realm of running, gunning, punning and toilet-humour-ing platformery became his oyster.

My query, then: before he was imbibed with the newfangled intelligence and (perhaps) capacity to cook flawless soufflés that the Suit proffered him, why approach it? His moronic, diminutive wormy mind must have had scant comprehension of what he was looking at. At best, he would have been thankful that this (presumably rather hefty) chuck of technological space-wonderment didn’t crush him into a blood-bleeding fleshy mess even more ghastly than he currently is.

There’s the caveat, alas, that this may merely be just what the earthworm resistance wants us to think. It’s rather a pedestrian life, cruising through the soil and being devoured by birds, hedgehogs, moles and everything else that sucks less than they do. Worms, as the franchise by the avant garde title of Worms makes plain, are angry, angry buggers. “No longer shall we be caught by the early bird! I vote that we emerge on the surface with hand grenades, bazookas and… exploding grandmothers, and take back the Earth from our oppressors!”

As such, it is time to profess allegiance to our annelid overlords. Or it would be, at present they seem content to propel ballistics at each other’s eyeballs. It’s only a matter of time.