BAKUGAN SEGA TOYS

It's a video game, it's a cartoon, it's a toy, it's a lunch box, and now it's a PC CD-ROM game. In under two years Earthworm Jim has made the evolutionary circle complete by returning to its roots, the computer, where Shiny entertainment first breathed (programming) life into this lovable, sardonic, super-powered nematode for their cartridge game. Now Activision has brought that same fast-paced, side-scrolling action game to the PC with more levels, more weapons, and a chance to trick-out your work area with a Jim desktop theme that plugs into Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95.

Like The Simpsons, this animated character traverses the terrain between slapstick humor and social commentary—you could even call it subversive. With the same mastery that ported Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure from a cartridge game to a PC game, Activision has done justice to Jim with a righteous conversion.

The keyboard serves as a decent controller for this side-scrolling game, but to skillfully dodge and shoot the biggest bosses you'll want to play this one with a gamepad. The game is Windows 95 native, so it integrates smoothly into your desktop and there's no installation. Now all Activision has to do is convert the rest of my favorite SNES and Genesis games to PC, and I'll be completely content. Teenaged turtles trained to be ninjas. Battling toads. Hedgehogs blessed with super speed. It came as no surprise to anyone playing games in the '90s when, joining the ranks of all the mutated, overpowered hero animals to come before him there arrived an earthworm in a spacesuit. With a gun. Named Jim.

Earthworm Jim was one company's creative answer to the question first posed by Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and the rest -- what would it be like for a commonplace creature to be given uncommon abilities, and then tasked to save the world? The company was the new-on-the-scene Shiny Entertainment, and Jim's debut on the SNES and Genesis systems in 1994 could have easily been dismissed by players who'd seen things like TMNT too many times before, dooming the start-up studio straight away. But the bizarre, ridiculous tone fueling the game, the comical approach to the style of its worlds and the character himself, and the vision of such designers as David Perry and Doug TenNapel ensured that Shiny, and its heroic earthworm, would get noticed.

The first thing you'll notice about this earthworm is his smooth, cartoony animation that moves with incredible fluidity and detail. Every stance, movement and attack has been carefully crafted, and everything about Jim just flows well. What's more, the environments he finds himself exploring are truly unique, with undulating, coiling platforms and nonstandard surfaces keeping them well removed from the vast majority of other games of the era, overpopulated with normal, flat platforms as they were. Unfortunately, the spectacular graphics and animation weren't matched by the gameplay. Those other, boring, flat-platformed platformers might not have looked anywhere near as nice as this in 1994, but most all of them controlled better -- Jim is a hassle to handle.

His jumping is floaty and imprecise. His primary melee attack, where he whips his own body out of the suit to crack it at foes, is slow to animate and hard to target. And his gun firing, while looking good, is also difficult to use -- you can't see any visible bullets, lasers or other projectiles emanating from its end, so you just have to guess at whether or not it's actually hurting your enemies.

It's sad, because the very thing that makes the graphics so good -- the style and fluidity of the animation -- damages the gameplay considerably.

Most of Earthworm Jim's stages are side-scrolling affairs, where you'll have to try to come to grips with his lack of control and get him safely to the end. Many levels, though, mix up that formula and offer some different style of play. A level called "Andy Asteroids?", for example, shows up several times through the adventure and plays out like a racer, as Jim chases the murderous Psy-Crow through a tunnel in space on his trusty rocket pod. Another stage sees Jim engaging in a bungee-jumping competition against an enemy made entirely of snot, and another has him riding an oversized, rampaging hamster through underwater tunnels that look like something out of Sealab 2021.

Several of those special stages are entertaining, and help to break up the monotony of the passable platforming in the rest of the game. Also improving the experience is the game's soundtrack, which is particularly inventive and sounds just as off-the-wall as the visuals look. And the game's overall world and cast of characters can't be called anything but original -- you've got villains here like Professor Monkey-for-a-Head and Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed, Slug-For-A-Butt. The names alone sell the entire premise, and it's not surprising that Earthworm Jim went on to inspire action fi

DOGFIGHTER JETSMAN 262 custom Celsius. This one comes from the world's first jet powered fighter plane, the German Messerschmitt Me 262. Last of the 1st batch of DOGFIGHTER Celsius for the Toy Art Gallery, it also piggy-backs the 1st working (though not reliably) cruise missile, the V-1 as it's main weapon.