I've been thinking about this for about eight-thousand years - would a Classic Worms League, with games played exclusively in the first-gen iterations of the games, be viable? How would it work? Which version of the game would be the centralized version? How do you even pull such a thing off? I'm going to sketch out my stupid thoughts here in the hopes that it encourages wider discussion.

Firstly, the biggest hurdle: Exactly no first-gen have online play. Worms Reinforcements adds IPX/Modem play to the original on the PC, and the version of Worms on Steam and GOG happens to include the expansion, but does that work? The short answer: No. So have we fallen at the first hurdle? Would such a league need to be played in person?

Again, shockingly: No. Applications like Parsec and Moonlight have made remote play shockingly easy with minimal input lag or encode bottlenecking (assuming you're on a decent connection). Indeed, I've hosted games of Worms: The Director's Cut on Parsec with as many as 7 people, and despite some issues with mouse input (which we suspect might be an issue with the Amiga emulator rather than Parsec itself) it went off more or less hitch-free.

So, assuming there was enough interest and assuming we could get community-wide (or sub-community-wide) adoption of Parsec, the next question is the bigger one: Which iteration of Worms becomes the standard?

The easiest, most obvious answer here is the version on Steam and GOG:

• It's the original PC version, running in DOSBox. As the PC version was also used as the base for a number of console versions (including the PS1 version, which was arguably the most successful and popular console build), it's the one most people who played 1st-gen Worms would be familiar with.
• It also has the Reinforcements expansion installed, meaning it has features like retreat time, health crates, and mine fuses that 2nd-gen players would be familiar with.
• It's readily available and very affordable.
• The only real con: The Ninja Rope. It's awful.

The answer I prefer, but will concede is not necessarily the most viable, is Worms: The Director's Cut.

• Features a number of weapons that would make the jump over to the 2nd-gen, including the Baseball Bat, Super Sheep, and Holy Hand Grenade.
• A vastly improved rope, including the ability to Rope (also has Cavern levels, which is nice).
• Hugely customizable - I've already converted the terrain styles and maps from W2/WA/WWP for use in WormsDC.
• WormsDC can be downloaded for free from Dream17.
• Slight downer: WormsDC is missing some 2nd-gen features such as retreat time and mine fuses, and crates cannot spawn in Cavern levels.
• Biggest downside: Amiga emulation isn't necessarily an easy setup, so the host would need to know their way around the emulator to properly configure it. That might be mitigated by having a community configuration/package that can be made readily available, but anyone who wants to host games of WormsDC would also likely need to buy Amiga Forever, the Amiga emulation suite.

Anyway, those are my thoughts so far. I'd love to hear from others.