Centipede

The Good
As a game with actual graphics, Centipede was a big surprise on the IBM. The gameplay is smooth and challenging, with the same rising difficulty level as the arcade version. Centipede puts your pulse rate through a series of hills and valleys as the creature gets lower on each level.

The Bad
Clearly it's unfair to compare Centipede with, say, Unreal Tournament. But try these, all pc conversions from 1983: Galaxian, Frogger, Moon Patrol, Lode Runner, Donkey Kong and PacMan. They're all better. As one of the first arcade games many people played, along with PacMan and Pong, centipede tends to inspire a certain virginal nostalgia among games fans. But even among pc games of the time centipede is limited and boring, the kind of game that you'll play a few times in between PacMan sessions.

The Bottom Line
If you're a student of computer gaming history, you should definitely play centipede, both in pc and arcade (MAME) form. You may even find you like it. But unlike other games of this vintage, from Galaxian to Zork to the utterly formidable PacMan, Centipede just doesn't hold up.

The Good
The first game programmed by a woman, Centipede is a 1-2 player game where you control a laser. A centipede appears at the top of the screen and makes it way down through a mushroom patch toward you, and you must shoot it before it comes near you. Then things take a turn for the worse. For instance, more segments are added, meaning that you have to worry about shooting it as well as the original centipede. There are other creatures to worry about as well, including jumping spiders, fleas, and scorpions. When the centipede has been destroyed, another appears and you have to do the same thing again.

When you shoot a segment, it turns into a mushroom, and when one of them blocks the centipede's path, it turns around and goes back in the direction that it came from. On that note, I have to say that there is a bit of strategy involved if you want to end the centipede's life once and for all. Try to have so many mushrooms about an inch from one another, so that the centipede is trapped between them, and it has no hope of getting out. This makes it quicker for you to complete the current level.

I read the comic book that came with the game, about a young elf named Oliver who needs to defeat a wizard who has turned his fellow villagers into poisonous toadstools. The comic is in color, rather than black-and-white, which makes it stand out from the comics around that time. The comic helped me get into the game.

The only version of Centipede that I tried out was the C64 version. In this version, the gameplay is spot on, as well as the graphics and sounds. The sounds that I enjoyed most was the sound that played while the jumping spider is around. When I heard this sound, I knew that it could be from another game that I have not played yet.

Graphic-wise, everything looks slightly out of detail compared to the original, but that is because the coin-op has better hardware than the inferior hardware that the C64 had for its time.

The Bad
The centipede moves quite fast, so it is easy to miss the individual segments as both scurry around the screen in under five seconds. Other than this, nothing bad concerns this game.

The Bottom Line
Without infringing copyrights, you could get the PC Booter version of Centipede on eBay and run it on your system, but it would probably be too fast, or it won't even run at all. So your best option is to obtain one of those retro consoles to play it on.

The Good
If you have been to the arcades back in the early eighties, you would have discovered a little gem called Centipede, Atari’s shooter where the object is to shoot the titular antagonist that makes its way down toward you through a garden of mushrooms, dealing with other critters along the way. I was too young to take a trip to the arcades, so the only way I got to experience it was to purchase the Commodore 64 home port made by Atarisoft.

The VIC-20 version of the game, also by Atarisoft, is still faithful to the original coin-op. The title screen looks good, and there is an option that allows you to go two player (each player takes turns), but not much else. Due to the machine’s limited resolution, the graphics are much larger, but this makes everything easier to see. The color scheme changes every time a wave is cleared. The sound effects match those of the arcade. Even though the spider sound is missing a note, this really didn’t bother me.

The Bad
When you lose all your lives and it is game over, you have to press the [F1] key twice to restart the game.

The Bottom Line
Centipede for the VIC-20 is a great port; everything is here minus the high score table the original coin-op has. The graphics and sound are nice, and it is a great little gem to add to your game collection.