Team17 Readies Worms For XBLA And Lemmings Fo...

Team17 Readies Worms For XBLA And Lemmings For PS3

More and more classic games are joining the Xbox Live Arcade line-up these days. Before the end of the year, Microsoft plans to release Small Arms, Novadrome, Assault Heroes, Heavy Weapon, Defender and Contra on XBLA, and this week Atari also promised to enrich the online marketplace with six of their classics in 2007: Centipede, Battlezone, Asteroids, Missle Command, Tempest and Warlords. And the best is yet to come.

If you were to ask someone what is the most fun multiplayer classic game, 9 out of 10 mentally deranged people will tell you it's Worms. Which is why an Xbox Live Arcade version of Team17's series would be more than welcome among their fans. Luckly for them, one such Worms game for XBLA is "pretty much all finished" and is currently in final certification stages with Microsoft. The British developer confirmed the news on their forums this week:

"Plans for announcements are being discussed with MS next week, hold tight", urged Martyn "Spadge" Brown (creative and studio director at Team17). "The game is in final certification stages btw, yes it's pretty much all finished apart from any last bugs they find. MS has a schedule of releases and we'll soon find out how we fit into that. Our first digital-platform release (ie. non retail, download only) is Lemmings 2 for PS3, very shortly."

Unfortunately, Worms is still nowhere to be seen on Microsoft's XBLA schedule for 2006, so fans will probably have to wait until next year to unleash the wacky annelids on their Xbox 360. Though we should know more about this next week.

In the meantime, as Martyn reminds in his post, they'll have Lemmings 2 up and running, climbing and tumbling on the PlayStation 3 "very shortly".

Where would digital distribution be without decade-old games?...

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)