Worms XBLA next week
Wrigglers on Wednesday
Worms has finally reared its head in the Microsoft garden, and has been confirmed for release on Xbox Live Arcade next Wednesday.
It will be available from 8am GMT and will cost you 800 points, which is about 6.80 in Her Majesty's money, or 9.60 in Euro-gold.
"Obviously we're absolutely delighted about Worms finally coming out for Live Arcade," Martyn Brown, studio director at Team 17, told Eurogamer this morning. "It's an excellent platform which presents an ideal way to play the game both socially offline and also multiplayer online."
"Sat playing it wirelessly on high-def it makes a terrific party game and playing it online, with voice and ranked leaderboards will be massively competitive. We've taken the opportunity to make it nice and slick too, so it looks, sounds and feels great to play."
This arcade update of the original Team 17 classic will feature HD resolutions, multiplayer support for four players locally or on Xbox Live, leaderboards and detailed tutorials for first time players. All this is in addition to the onslaught of 22 weapons, customisable worm teams, random landscape generation, multiple graphical themes and 12 achievements.
"We're also very happy about the balanced weapon set, which gets the game back to it's strategic best. We think even the rope fanatics will be chuffed!" he added, reminding me of a friend who used to turn off time limits and bundle my entire team into one ditch, before blowing the ground away from beneath them and dispatching me in one lousy turn.
"We think it offers something very different to the majority of titles on XBLA, and at only 800 points it's got to be a steal for the hours of entertainment on offer."
Worms, in case you outrageously didn't already know, puts two or more teams of soiled-wrigglers on a quirky map to battle it out to the death. You take it in turns to murder each other, using all manner of weapons and tools, such as bazookas, dynamite, banana bombs, air-strikes, exploding sheep and blow-torches.
We suggest you buy it, it's as simple as that.