Time Warped 1980 - Centipede

On 02/06/2018 at 02:50 PM by KnightDriver

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Wherein Ookla the Mok reacts with horror at the game I am playing.

cent

from arcade-museum.com

Wroah, wroah? Ookla! It's just an arcade video game! Stand back and don't attack the cabinet. It's called Centipede and you have to stop the centipede's path through the mushrooms or be destroyed. I know your dislike of insects Ookla, but it is just lights on a screen. Here you can safely do battle with the terror.

Take the controls. See, the centipede proceeds from the top of the screen to the bottom through the mushrooms. You can shoot it but it will split into smaller creatures that continue on. Each small part becomes a mushroom when you shoot it, adding to the protection it may find from them. But look out, Ookla! There is also a spider that will attack near the bottom of the screen, so keep your wits about you. It attacks at angles that are hard to avoid. Then there are the fleas that run fast down the screen and lay more mushrooms. Clear the mushrooms around you so you can have a clear shot at all these horrors Ookla. And watch out for the scorpions! They poison the mushrooms and cause the centipede to rush towards you.

Wroah, wroah! Oh geeze. He's pulled the joystick [trackball] out of the machine. Well, you've done it now Ookla. The centipede will win the day.

I got out of there as Ookla proceeded to destroy the whole cabinet and zipped back from fictional 1994 to my own time.

I started up Atari Flashback Classics Vol. 1 on Xbox One and played arcade Centipede. I never had much affinity for the game back in 1980, but I'm kind of growing to like it now. I didn't find the lack of a trackball annoying at all either - controls were fine.

There are a few achievements for this game. I got the one for high score, but this time I was going to clear all the mushrooms off the screen. This was way harder than it seemed; although, maybe I was missing something. I think I might have had to keep some part of the first centipede alive while I cleared the mushrooms because, in the next levels, I got those fleas that drop loads of mushrooms on the field, and there was little I could do about it.

i liked that the mushrooms degrade like the shields in Space Invaders; that is, in a fragmentary way that suggests they are made up of very tiny pixels.

When I was done, I picked up Thundarr's Sun Sword and gave a few practice swipes. Yea, I stole it while I was in their world. Sweet!

Super Step Contributing Writer

02/06/2018 at 04:06 PM

I don't think I've ever played Centipede, even though I hear about it a lot.

KnightDriver

02/06/2018 at 07:32 PM

Wha? Just kidding. It's surprisingly still fun. Shooting bugs seems to be a constant in video games.

Cary Woodham

02/07/2018 at 01:49 AM

How could Ookla pull a joystick out of an arcade machine that used a trackball? :)

Centipede was always my dad's favorite classic arcade game. When we would go to arcades as a family, my mom would go to the Frogger machine, I would of course, go to Pac-Man, but my dad would make a beeline for Centipede.

Centipede has gotten quite a few updates over the years. I think the first arcade sequel i ever saw for anything was Millipede. I played a Centipede update on the PSOne that almost got a cartoon based on it, and the most recent Centipede update was on the Wii U and WayForward made it!

I can't get that 'shoot all the mushrooms' achievement either.

02/07/2018 at 11:11 PM

Whoops. I was in a rush and missed that. I'll have to change it.

The updates sound interesting. I'm going to have to try them out when I get to the years they were released.

NintendoFanJon

02/07/2018 at 11:21 AM

A shame I never played Centipede or really many older classics. It's a problem I'm rectifying with my emulators!

02/07/2018 at 11:03 PM

I like when some of these games are inserted into a modern game as a kind of joke. That's my favorite way to play them but there are few examples of that.

SanAndreas

02/07/2018 at 04:49 PM

Centipede was one of my favorites, along with Millipede. It was a truly sadistic game, forcing you to divide your attention between the centipede and the scorpions at the top of the screen and the spiders at the bottom. They were probably my favorite games that were originally made by Atari back then.

When I was a kid, I also saw an Armenian made knockoff of Centipede that ran on hacked Galaxian hardware. It had the look and sounds of Galaxian rather than Centipede, and there was even a scrolling starfield in the background as in Galaxian and Galaga. The mushrooms changed colors when you shot them instead of showing deterioration. It was called War of the Bugs, or Monsterous Manouvers in a Mushroom Maze. That's how it was spelled on the title screen. I even made a Youtube video and wrote a blog about it on Pixlbit.

02/07/2018 at 10:57 PM

Interesting knockoff. After just playing an arcade verison of COD Black Ops in the extras to the game, I'm thinking old school arcade versions of modern games are really cool. I'd like an Earth Defense Force twin stick bug shooter. They did a shmup recently that I might try out tomorrow on PS4.

PixlBit