“You, I reckon, are definitely a roper.” I had known Aidan for about twenty minutes by the time he made this judgement. It stung a little. How could he be so certain after such a short period? How – augh! – could he be so right?
Worms 2 came out while I was at university, and we all fell for it quite hard. This is social gaming at its most brilliant: a bunch of friends wash up on some procedural 2D island and then they take turns trying to kill everyone else off. Weapons are dropped in crates, mines litter the landscape. You can die by losing all your health or by falling in the water. It is simple, but fraught. It can be wonderfully maddening.
“Roper” referred to “ninja rope”, one of the few Worms items that wasn’t explicitly about doing people harm. You can move about in Worms 2, but it’s a pretty slow, incremental business. But if you used your ninja rope, that fired off like a Batman gadget and allowed you to swing around and launch yourself across the map, man, if you used that you could really cover some distance. It was very risky: mines, the beckoning yawn of the ocean. But done well it meant you could bounce all the way from one side of the screen to the other and menace people who had assumed they were safe.