Worms HD [Xbox Live Arcade] [X360]

First up: a confession. This review is not objective. It is not unbiased. It is written by someone who poured uncountable hours into the PSOne version of the game, playing four-player matches into the small hours night after night after night. Our Worms teams became legends, their kill-counts making perfectly good telephone numbers, and our banana bomb skills were honed to razor-sharp precision. To say that your reviewer is predisposed to like this game would be a significant understatement. You have been warned.

To business. Of the goodness-knows-how-many Worms titles that have been released in the 12 years of its life, the XBLA version bears most resemblance to Worms: Open Warfare, which was released on portable platforms about 12 months ago. To the relief of just about everyone, it ditches the more recent games' 3D pretensions and over-complicated gameplay, delving back to the game's 2D, 16-bit roots.

Good thing, too. Yes, Worms offers some of the finest four-player competitive fun around, but it only works when the experience is as pure and undiluted as possible. Even if you've never played the game before, you won't take long to understand it -- it's a timeless concept. Your team of four worms is spread about a randomly generated 2D map, mixed up with the worms of between one and three other teams. You take turns to order your worms to fire one of a selection of variously destructive weapons at each other, taking account of shot power, elevation, and wind speed, and sit back and enjoy the results. It's somewhat like playing golf with high-explosive balls, and laden with a devastatingly satisfying blend of skill and luck.

By landing a shot to the side of an enemy worm, for example, you can blow him into the air and into an adjacent mine or even into the water at the bottom of every level, causing his instant demise. Imagine the fixed grin on the face of your opponent as he pretends to be unperturbed at his loss. Better yet, figure out creative ways of nailing two or three of his worms in the same shot, or elegantly negotiating the level's terrain to prod him gently off a cliff.

On Xbox Live Arcade, Worms checks each important feature box. Online multiplayer with leaderboards? Yup, got that. Offline? Yup, up to four players, even with only one controller. Can you create your own team with hilarious, rude, or libelous names? You bet. Can you set up your own rulesets and save them? You sure can. About the only thing you can't do is take multiple local players into an online match, but that'd be a feature ripe for abuse.