I remember when I first played Centipede: it was such an awesome experience, where you would just move your little guy back and forth and try to shoot mushrooms and centipedes and just about any sort of garden organism. Although one thing that did get to me was the odd control mechanism, where you just rolled a ball with the palm of your hand.
Palms don’t really cut it. Fortunately, they created Centipede for the PC (and also about a whole other slew of consoles).
I remember connecting it to my Joystick. It was a lot better doing it with a joystick in hand instead of fitting your hand over something. Basically, the PC version isn’t too different from the arcade version, or any other version for that matter. But that’s ok, because now you don’t have to use that stupid ball.
You also don’t have to pay twenty five cents for each play, which is really good because up to this day I still die every five minutes. Most people have played Centipede at some point in their lives, and so the monsters do not need a heavy description of them, but I can give one anyways. I remember there were about 4 monsters
– I think. First and foremost, is the centipede?
The goal of each stage is to destroy it. If you shoot the head or the back, it will just lose it and go back one. If you hit any segment in between, it will break off and form a new centipede. The idea is to hit each segment without creating too many extra centipedes, because they will kill you if they get down far enough, and they tend to go faster up close too. Next is the flea, and it is really annoying. It goes down FAST until it eats enough mushrooms, and kills me often. The spiders don’t make me too mad, because they tend to die quickly, but they bounce around it kind of annoys me.
Last is the scorpion, who always turns mushrooms he touches into poisonous mushrooms, which kill you, and he makes the scorpion go down to the bottom of the screen, which is really annoying too. The sound is alright, but most arcade styled games don’t really need good music to be fun, they just need to be really fun and fast paced, and Centipede certainly lives up to that.
