Earthworm Jim: Special Edition

The Good
All too often a Sega CD game would be the same as the Sega Genesis edition, with a few editions.

Part of this was because of the severe hardware (even for its day) limitations of the Sega CD, and ( I suspect) plain, old fashion laziness. The development mistakes that Sega made with the Sega CD and the Sega 32X should be taught in classrooms under the headline "How To Royally Ruin A Business". But I digress.

Earthworm Jim: Special Edition is one of the (few) Sega CD Games that is NOT just a carbon copy of its cartridge based cousin. New to the SEGA CD edition is a CD audio soundtrack, bigger levels, more secrets, more weapons, reworked animations and additional enemies.

The game offers some of the best platforming-style animation, music and graphics you will find on the Sega CD. Clearly, the programmers wanted to push the capabilities of the Sega CD hardware and offer consumers a Earthworm Jim game that could stand on its own two feet.

The Bad
Their are really no glaring flaws with Earthworm Jim: Special Edition. Granted, the game could not, totally, escape from the hardware limitations of the Sega CD.

The Sega CD had the same graphics capabilities as the Sega Genesis (namely, 64 colors on-screen from a palette of 512) It also had less internal memory then the Genesis, which did not help with the loading time.

The large CD-ROM storage capacity, hardware scaling effects and music abilities were certainly nice, but they were not enough to constitute an actual upgrade and could not compete (in terms of graphics) with standard Super Nintendo and even low end PC capabilities.

Do not get me wrong; Earthworm Jim: Special Edition is a great Sega CD title. It is probably one of the best Sega CD games released and, I would argue, one of the best games in the Earthworm Jim series.

Yet, even at its best its hard not to be reminded of how some of its potential greatness (and the greatness of many other Sega CD titles) was curtailed by some shortsighted folks at Sega.

The Bottom Line
Earthworm Jim: Special Edition is a great platforming game in every way that matters; animation, graphics, music, sound, control and game play and (yes) humor and creativity.