Worm Whomper

Worm Whomper is an action game released by Activision for the Intellivision in 1983. It is a shooter which has players defending a crop of corn from hordes of insects.

Just yesterday, Felton Pinkerton took his wife to the fair instead of spraying his corn crops with pesticide. It turns out this was a bad idea; now there are numerous insects trying to eat the corn! The crop of corn is shown on the left side of the screen and the insects approach from the right. Inchworms, caterpillars, snails, moths, slugs, millipedes, and more will attack; depending on the type of the insect and its size, one or more shots of pesticide will be needed to kill it. If any insects do make it past the player and reach the corn, part or all of the corn stalk will be eaten. The game ends when all of the corn is gone.

Player's have two types of weapons to defend from the invading insects. The first is a spray gun which shoots a small amount of pesticide. Ammo is unlimited, so players can fire away! If any of the insects touches the spray gun, it will be destroyed; however, another spray gun can be picked up in the tool shed at the bottom of the screen. Like ammo, an unlimited number of spray guns can be picked up from the shed so players are never out of a weapon, however doing say may take precious time. The second defense are plough balls; plough balls eliminate anything in their path (even insects that would normally take more than one shot to destroy), however they are very limited in number. Players begin with only three, and three more are awarded for each wave of attacking pests destroyed.

As the game progresses, the bugs become quicker, more numerous, and more of the larger types of bugs appear. After every four waves of pests are cleared, a bonus corn plant is earned (if the field already has the maximum amount of corn, the bonus corn will remain in reserve until their is room for it to grow).

Many early Activision games allowed you to earn an iron-on patch for achieving high scores. In Worm Whomper, the "Activision Worm Whompers" patch could be earned by scoring 75,000 points or higher. Players could send in a photo of the screen to Activision showing their high score and they would receive the patch.