The Team17 Softography Says...
"One of the worlds most fun, wackiest, addictive and enjoyable game’s hits the Dreamcast in its most multi-player/on-line focused form todate!
Worms World Party is the perfect online gaming experience, on a global scale, with its mixture of globally appealing humour, outrageous entertainment, addictive game-play and myriad of game modes and options.
This World Party edition contains a massively focused section for multiplayer games, including co-operative and confrontational multi-player missions, new fantastic multi-player game modes and much, much more besides.
The very nature of the game means that the game - and all it’s multiplayer delights can also be enjoyed by a group around a single PC or console, although nothing beats the delight of despatching a homing missile 14,000 miles across the planet to sink your foes!"
Dream17 says...
Sega were impressed with Worms Armageddon when it made it's way onto the Dreamcast console in 1999. It was a great game not just because of it's original gameplay and colourful graphics but because of it's multiplayer value. And Sega thought Worms was just what Sega needed to help it's failing console's online services. So, if the information I have is accurate, they asked Team17 to develop a version of the game with DreamArena support, and thus WWP was born.
Essentially "Worms Armageddon with knobs on", the big thing for Dreamcast owners was the addition of net support. PC users, however, already had this feature. They'd had it since Worms 2, so it was hardly new for them. Something new had to be added to the game to make it worth buying for the PC (the Dreamcast market not being large nough to sustain an exclusive title) - new missions, new Training modes, an improved Deathmatch game and the WormPot were all added into the game. A Mission Editor was added as well, and made available for download from the WWP website. This allowed players to create their own Missions, Training Modes etc. for the first time (without using an unofficial add-on program such as the WA Fiddler). As well as all this, Multiplayer Missions were also added allowing two players to play with each other or against, performing various tasks. It was fresh, and enjoyable.
WormPot - three little buttons, so many possibilities. Each of the three toggles had a selection of what some other games would call "Mutators" which affect how the game plays. For example, Fort Games, or a game with the Super-Rope. Modes that had previously been cheats in W:A were now part of the WormPot - blood, Aqua Sheep etc. had all been moved there, meaning that you couldn't earn cheats anymore - there was no real sense of accomplishment in completing the missions anymore.
While the Dreamcast version of WWP topped the Dreamcast Top 10 chart for a while towards the end of 2001 and part of the way through 2002, the additional console releases for the PSone and GBA weren't well recieved. The PSone version was merely a prod-about of the previous PSone version of W:A, and was a missed oppertunity to fix a few bugs and problems. The GBA version while definitely an improvement over the abismal job done on W:A for the GameBoy Color, still lacked some of the things Wormers would have liked to have seen, such as a decent Ninja Rope. The N-Gage version looks similar to the PC version and might just be the handheld Worming experience we're looking for. Then again, the GBA version looked like it might have been good too... are handheld Wormers doing nothign more than chasing a Holy Grail?
Many people in the Worms Community don't like WWP. As I said before, it is just W:A with knobs on, and in theory would have been better had it have been released as an expansion pack. However, many people (myself included) believe that WWP is a good improvement on W:A and while some of the features in the W:A BETA patches aren't in WWP, it's still a good multiplayer game. WWP is the "Oh No! More Lemmings" to W:A's "Lemmings". If that makes sense, you play too many videogames.
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I dont know about you, but WWP is a small but satisfying addition to the Worms franchise. It may have been quote "W:A with knobs on it" but the fact is it had everything Armageddon did and more. I play the game for multiplayer havoc, not single player mayhem. (Sadly, I understood that WWP is to W:A as Oh No! More Lemmings was to the original Lemmings... I play too many videogames.