Yes, you read the publisher line right. It's a computer game published by Cheapass Games. Yes, the same one.
The "cheapass" attitude to game publishing (use simple bits, omit bits people will have anyway, and concentrate on a quality game design and playability) is one that could (IMHO) be well applied to the field of computer games. At the moment, the consumer demands in the computer game market for incredibly sophisticated graphics and sound have meant that the media production cost for games is so high that many developers simply can't afford it, and those that can are reluctant to risk that amount on anything but an already tried-and-tested game design - hence the scores of FPS and RTS clones that line store shelves. Some developers do write games with lower quality media and more creative designs, but usually can only publish it as unadvertised, downloadable shareware (and, of course, those "creative" designs include plenty of duffers). The idea for Cheapass to publish games of this type - and to target them at tabletop/board gamers, who are more likely to accept this type of game than the mainstream computer game market - is a great one. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have gone too well; I've never seen any gaming store carrying Plasmaworm, and I could only obtain it by getting the downloadable e-commerce version.
Anyway, enough about the philosophy: onto the actual game. Plasmaworm is, basically, an enhanced version of the old Snake game that used to come bundled with DOS and that now comes bundled with mobile phones. The aim is to drive your snake ("plasmaworm") around a playfield ("improbability tank"), eating ("absorbing") food ("probability eidolons"). Each meal makes it grow bigger, and you die if you crash into any walls or into your own tail. The challenge, then, is to work out the timing and routing to ensure you can grab the food from its random locations while finding enough suitable space to fold your excess tail length away into.
You're probably pretty disappointed after all that writing above about encouraging creative designs.. but Plasmaworm adds a lot to the Snake formula. First and foremost is the fact that, while the old Snake could move only in compass directions in a strictly orthogonal world, the Plasmaworm has full freedom of direction. As such, rather than just going in the direction you point the joystick, it has to be turned incrementally. This makes things a lot trickier - passing through a passage now requires turning and straightening up without hitting the sides of the passage, and you have to allow for your turning circle. On the plus side, it adds a lot more scope for planning your route, which is what made Snake interesting in the first place.
There are also two special items available as food; a life power-up and a gun. The life power-up is almost entirely pointless, since Plasmaworm resets a level every time you lose a life and uses level passwords to let you restart from where you left off, meaning that the only practical difference between losing a life and losing the game is the loss of your score and the amount of UI fluff you have to go through. The gun lets your worm shoot bullets, which can be fired at the targets to "pick them up" without needing to actually touch them. This is another neat addition, as it means you can decide which targets to pick up and which to shoot to optimise your route; the only problem is that the gun is time limited and the timing with which the items appear is random. It's entirely possible that it'll run out before any items appear, which makes the whole endeavour pointless. Special tiles which speed up or slow down the worm have been added, but unfortunately they affect the whole worm based on the location of the head (meaning that it really does just alter the game pacing) rather than just affecting the area that overlaps them (which would have allowed even more interesting route considerations)
The second big change is that several extra types of level have been added. As well as the eidolon levels, which play like regular Snake, three extra types have been added. The most interesting of these are the duck-hunt and noid-hunt levels.
Duck hunt levels follow the standard rules of Snake except that, instead of being static, your targets are ducks which bounce randomly around the playfield, and are all released at once instead of coming out one by one. What makes this interesting is that their motion is constrained by your worm's tail, meaning that you can eat a few to extend your tail and then wrap your tail in loops in an attempt to catch a few for easy consumption. The gun is also available on these levels, so you can just open fire on the ducks if you want. The noid-hunt levels are similar except that the ducks are now jellyfish-like creatures which fire back at you, meaning that trapping them with your tail becomes far more risky since this exposes you to their fire. Unfortunately, there is only one duck-hunt level and two noid-hunt levels in the game.
The third extra type of level is the plasmangler level, the last level in the game, in which your worm (with a permanent gun) does battle against a writhing tentacled creature which clearly belongs either under a microscope or in an untranslated anime film. The creature is very impressively animated and looks very cool on its own, and killing it is a suitable challenge.. the only problem is that this level is basically a straight shoot-em-up in the "Star Castle" mould, and the length of your snake has no significance other than as a meter of the number of shots you can live through. Oh, and the fact that when you finally beat the beastie, the ending is kinda disappointing.
The graphics and sound are not awesome, but they are quite impressive; the sound consists of strange ambient samples (with some very neat effects when the worm crashes or completes a level) and works well in context, and the graphics for the actual gameplay are black and white graphics laid over colour-cycling graphical plasma effects, which creates a unique look (which can however get a little hard on the eyes at times).
Although the gameplay sounds simple, it turns out to be quite addicting and frustrating for the simple reason that any time you die it always feels like it was due to a bonehead move that you could have easily prevented.. and you get determined to prevent it next time. This may keep you interested and addicted for quite a long while. However, the game still suffers badly from lack of variety, and after a while the frustration may give way to boredom.
The lack of variety is demonstrated most clearly by the level editor. It's a very comprehensive editor which lets you edit all aspects of the game levels - as well as moving the walls around, you can change the probabilities of tokens appearing in different areas, create hunt and mangler levels, change the plasma backgrounds and even rewrite the music (using a built-in sequencer!). But, at the end of the day, there's just no inspiration to create very much because it'll be so similar to what is there already.
Further, when the game is complete there isn't much motivation to play again, since the score is largely just based on how far you got without dying. A "time attack" mode would have been interesting, but impractical because (as mentioned above) the locations and timing with which objects appear is random. The actual game at the moment has this backwards - some levels award you extra points for taking *longer* to complete!
Plasmaworm supports a 2-player mode which can be either cooperative or competitive. Perhaps unfortunately, though, the competitive mode isn't the classic Tron-style competitive Snake; instead, both worms start at a middling length (not enough to trap the other one) and have guns, and the aim is to shoot the other guy. You still win if he crashes into you, but you probably don't have enough tail to work towards that. There is no other competitive 2-player and no support for greater numbers of players. This is a bit of a shame, given that multi-player Snake/Tron could act as a great starting point for more enhancements (in fact, some other modern Snake clones (such as Heroes) have focused on this, and even I remember the "enhancements" fudged into Nibbles by random people in my old school computer room ;) )
So, is it worth your ten bucks? Maybe. If you're looking for a quick game to pop up and down while you're doing something else in background, very probably (although it does take over the screen). If you really like Snake, very probably. If you play the demo and find it addictive, quite possibly (although one tip: if you play the demo, the initial levels of the full version might be too easy and boring, so *slide* over them, geddit?) In general, if you're looking for an mildly interesting and diverting game of skill, this fits the bill, but it is quite simple and may pall a little too quickly for some tastes.
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