Playing Earthworm Jim 2 on a PC in 1996 meant trading native console joypads for crisp high-resolution graphics, Redbook CD audio, and a collection of bizarre mini-games that turned traditional platforming upside down.

Shiny's absurd platformer traded predictable jumping for pure variety

The original adventure built its reputation on sleek animation and fluid shooting, but Earthworm Jim 2 abandoned straight run-and-gun gameplay in favor of constant mechanical left turns. Instead of refining the momentum of the first game, designer Douglas TenNapel and the team at Shiny Entertainment crammed every level with a completely different joke. You spend five minutes blasting strange alien fauna, and the next screen forces you to bounce squealing puppies across a marshmallow pad to save them from crashing into the floor.

That level, named "Puppy Love", recurs throughout the campaign, forcing you to juggle Peter Puppy's fragile little wards while dodging bomb drops from Psy-Crow. Drop too many dogs and Peter turns into a screaming monster that shreds your health bar down to nothing. It is a stressful, hilarious twist, though repeating it multiple times across a single playthrough causes major friction for players who just wanted to shoot things.

When you are on foot, the core movement retains its whip-smart feel. Jim can snap his head to attack, use his green backpack slime companion Snott to latch onto sticky ceilings, or inflate Snott into a floating parachute. The variety of stages is genuinely staggering: "Anything but Tangerines" offers classic platforming, "The Flyin' King" puts you in control of a floating pod guiding a bomb on a balloon, and "ISO 9000" drops you into a surreal office nightmare full of filing cabinets and falling paper. You might find yourself guiding a pig down a giant slide or navigating a dark tunnel as a blind cave salamander, completely disoriented by physical obstacles.

The Earthworm Jim 2 MS-DOS port looks gorgeous, but missing levels leave a scar

Porting the game to PC was handed to German studio Rainbow Arts Software GmbH, and the team faced a strange production hurdle right out of the gate. Because of existing distribution arrangements between Shiny and Activision, the original creators could not share their source files directly with Rainbow Arts for the 1996 release. The conversion team had to redraw and adapt the visual assets from scratch to fit high-resolution SVGA monitors.

The result on screen is sharp, displaying crisp character sprites that pop against high-definition background art. Unfortunately, the porting process hit a massive snag during level translation. The Playmates Interactive Entertainment, Inc. published DOS release famously lacks "Lorenzen's Soil", a stage built entirely around digging through dirt walls with your plasma gun that was present on console hardware. Losing that level entirely leaves a noticeable hole in the campaign progression, a missing piece that PC fans still point out today.

The control setup was another point of friction for PC gamers. Playing an action title designed around a six-button game controller on a standard 1990s keyboard layout felt stiff straight out of the box. Unless you went into the key mapping menus immediately to bind your whip, jump, and weapon keys to something comfortable, the default layout guaranteed accidental deaths during fast-paced boss fights against Evil the Cat or Bob the Killer Goldfish.

Weapon madness and mechanics that kept players guessing

Arming yourself in this sequel is just as unpredictable as the level layout. Alongside the classic plasma blaster, you run into ridiculous pick-ups that dramatically alter how you approach fights. To survive the strange gauntlets in levels like "Level Ate" or "Udderly Abominable", you have to know what your arsenal actually does before pulling the trigger:

• 3-Finger Gun: Fires a wide spread of three massive energy blasts, instantly clearing whole clusters of standard enemies in front of you.
• Barn Blaster: Clears every hostile creature currently visible on the screen in one single destructive burst.
• Homing Missiles: Tracks moving targets automatically, perfect for taking out floating hazards without needing precise aim.
• Bubble Gun: Fires completely harmless soap bubbles that float uselessly into the air, serving as a trick pickup that leaves you totally defenseless.

That playfulness extended directly into the game's physical manual. The booklet came packed with absurd throwaway gags, including the blunt declaration that "Humour in manuals is measured by weight, not by volume." The writers even poked fun at standard hint lines by printing: "no, we're not telling you the super deluxe cheat code... so don't even THINK of calling for it!" naturally tempting players to pause the game and punch in sequences for 10 Extra Metal Worms, 81 Meal Worms, or free Homing Missiles.

Sound Blaster noise, CD audio tracks, and manual gags defined the PC package

If you possessed a Sound Blaster board plugged into your motherboard, the audio experience was spectacular. The PC release took full advantage of Redbook CD-DA audio to play CD-quality tracks straight off the disc during gameplay. Stage soundtracks mixed heavy cartoon sound effects with dramatic classical compositions, famously playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata over quiet, moody level sections and blasting Funiculì, Funiculà during frantic action sequences.

When Computer Gaming World reviewed the release, they gave it a full 5 out of 5 score, pointing out that

"The graphics and sound are fantastic, but most importantly it is just plain FUN."

That summary caught the exact spirit of why people tolerated the control quirks and missing content. Even when a stage mechanic failed to land or became tedious, the sheer speed at which the game threw new visual jokes at you kept you pushing forward to see what Princess What's-Her-Name was up to in the next world.

Where the sequel lands today and how to play it right now

The Earthworm Jim 2 MS-DOS game is a chaotic snapshot of 1990s platforming experiment, willing to break its own rules every five minutes just to land a gag. While losing "Lorenzen's Soil" hurts the package's completeness and the repetitive "Puppy Love" sequences will test your patience, the fluid character animation, stellar CD audio score, and wild variety make it worth exploring.

You can play Earthworm Jim 2 online right now, running the full Earthworm Jim 2 free in your browser without downloading any software or wrestling with DOS configuration files. Jump straight into the action, head to the control menu to set your key bindings, and see if you have the reflexes to handle the flying bombs, marshmallow pads, and runaway pigs for yourself.