Worms play with guns

Why are worms involved in warfare?

I have found a game I can actually play under Wine! Yes, I know people say you can play heaps of games from wine, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Of all the CD programs I’ve tried, only three seem to work under wine. And one of them is a little classic—literally. Anyone who remembers the DOS game Worms, will be familiar with these little creatures from Team17 whose mission seems to be to annihilate everything and everyone else in sight, except for themselves of course. No screenshots, as I’m probably going to violate various licence agreements if I do.

Not a great taste in wine

You might ask why on earth I want to run such a game under wine when I could simply run it on Windows instead, and gain the benefits of running the game properly, on an operating system for which it was designed. I’ll explain why. I seem to use Windows about once every six months at the moment, if that. I use Linux for 99% (or more) of the time that I’m on the computer, and I don’t want to be tied to the Windows platform any more. Not that I have much choice, as most games are written for Windows first, and maybe Linux gets a thought in after that. I was familiar with Worms 2 and Worms World Party, having installed them under Windows at one stage, and watching while worms blew each other to bits with insane weaponry, and spouted totally corny lines I just had to laugh at. Just today, I was lamenting the fact I couldn’t get most of my other games running under Wine (nor, for that matter, the games that zoombuggy has collected - more on that later), because they wanted stuff that wine simply didn’t provide. And this was using the latest available wine sourcecode, so it’s not like I was not keeping up with the play. So, I decided to try out the copy of Worms 2 I had sitting up on the shelf, all unused and unplayed.

Awww. That’s a sad story.

Anyhow, I stuck the CD in and mounted it, and executed the installer—once I found it, that is. It did the normal thing that installers do, copied a bit of data on to the hard drive (don’t they all), and tried to display the README using write.exe, which I don’t actually have. Hey, that didn’t matter, the game was installed. When I ran it, Worms came up with all the relevant graphics, sound and action - so I’m stoked, as that’s one game that actually works.

You mentioned zoombuggy

Unfortunately, zoombuggy is not as fortunate as myself. For starters, she doesn’t have a CDROM drive, so she can’t install games even if she wanted to. Secondly, we’ve tried all of the games she owns under wine, but none of them want to work under anything but DOS or Windows. And because she doesn’t have a CDROM drive, most of them won’t run as they require the CD mounted before they’ll play. It’s beside the point that she doesn’t have a running Windows install at the moment, due to her having changed machines twice in the past 12 months.

Has she found any games she can play?

Yes, she has, though they are Linux games, of course. Suffice it to say that she enjoys them, and has a good time playing them. And with that, I’ll sign off.