Video Game Review #600: Centipede

Centipede

Arcade

Nostalgia Factor:

Woo hoo, 600 game reviews. What a truly productive life I live.

Centipede is a game I was very familiar with as a kid. The game came out in 1980, and I was born in 1982. Growing up, I would encounter this game at almost every bowling alley/restaurant/movie theater I went to. It wasn't my favorite game, but I'd pop in a quarter from time to time and give it a go. My overall memories of the game are fairly positive.

I haven't played Centipede in a good 30 years. Maybe even more. What prompted me to come back and play it again? I don't know. My eventual plan is to review every single game I've ever played, so I would have had to come back to it at some point. Why not now?

Story:

If this game has a story, I have no idea what it is. There are no cutscenes. There is no ending. You fly around in a little spaceship and you shoot centipedes and the occasional spider. What else do you need to know?

Gameplay:

I was impressed by how quickly the game hooked me. This might be a controversial opinion for someone my age, but this era of gaming is one of my least favorites. I like games you can beat. I like making progress and advancing the story. I've never been a big fan of games that simply go on forever; where you are playing for a high score rather than a chance to beat the game. There have been a few exceptions over the course of this blog: Tetris, Frogger, Tron, Journey, Burger Time, and a few others. But for the most part, I sort of frown upon these types of games. Centipede is another one of my exceptions.

The game is just flat out fun to play. It's easy to pick up and play, but hard to master. Right off the bat, you see what you have to do. You fly around on the bottom of the screen, and you shoot the centipedes that are descending down through the mushrooms towards you. You move around and you hit the shoot button. Easy, right?

Wrong. While the concept might seem simple, there is so much more at play here. First, there is the distance. The centipede comes down from the top of the screen. There's a long way from the bottom of the screen to the top. Your laser weapon shoots at a certain slow speed. You're going to have to get the timing right if you want any chance at hitting that centipede.

Then, there's the spiders. These spiders come at you from the side of the screen. They are a bitch to avoid. They move up and down, and over to the side - seemingly at random. It's so hard to predict what they are going to do. I think those spiders have probably killed more gamers than the centipedes ever have. It often seems like they come in right at you. If you linger too close to the edge of the screen, they can pop out and kill you without giving you a chance to react. I hate them. But it is very satisfying when you get to shoot one. It's like yeah take that you sonofabitch.

Next, there are the mushrooms. They block your laser weapon. Enough hits will wipe out a mushroom, allowing you to shoot past it now. When a centipede runs into a mushroom, it bounces back the other direction and moves one spot lower on the screen. It's often very satisfying when there is a tunnel of mushrooms and the centipede comes straight down. You can just camp out below it and fire away. The downside is that after killing a piece of a centipede, it turns into a mushroom. So as fast as you can wipe these darn mushrooms out, they can return equally as fast.

Then there is the centipede itself. When you shoot it, it breaks into multiple pieces that scatter in opposite directions. The smaller the piece is, the faster it moves. Those little tiny pieces can be super hard to hit. Having good timing is a must if you want to succeed in lining up your shots. Once you've defeated all the pieces of a centipede, the colors of the level change and you move onto the next level. The difficulty ramps up ever so slightly with each passing level as well. Pretty soon, the enemies will be zipping across the screen super fast. The spiders will get even more erratic. The centipede pieces even harder to hit. This is usually where I conk out and run out of lives.

I considered using save states to rack up an abnormally high score, but I decided against it. Why not test myself and see how good I can do normally? I've been saving my high scores to the game so my son can see them and try to break them when he is older.

The game is extremely addicting. While it is very simple in nature, I almost never get tired of playing it. I can play round after round after round and before I know it, several hours have passed. That's the mark of a truly great game, in my opinion.

Graphics:

Obviously, the game has a very minimalist look going for it. Plain black background, very simple looking characters. But it works. The game has a very distinct feel to it. I think all the colors and the unique design of the mushrooms and the spiders really makes it stand out. You see this game and you immediately know it is Centipede. 

No, it is not going to win any beauty awards. But it doesn't need to. Whether it looks like this or it looks like the most amazing game you've ever seen, what matters to me is the gameplay. Do the graphics hinder the gameplay at all? Nope. Not even a little.

Sound:

This game's not going to win any music or sound awards either. There is no music. The game is completely silent sans the sound effects. The sound effects themselves are fine. All you really hear is the sound of your weapon firing, and the sound of the wiggly spider as he makes his way across the screen. I'll say what I did about the graphics: it doesn't hinder the gameplay at all. But are the sound effects particularly memorable? Eh. I can't say with a straight face that people will recognize this game by sound in the same way they would a game like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.

Overall:

As much as I've always liked Centipede, I feel I've underestimated it. I don't even know how long it's been since I last played Centipede before I fired it up for this review. 25 years? 30? I'll never let that long pass again. I can easily see Centipede becoming a game that I will go to whenever I turn on my RetroPie. Play it for a few rounds. Save any high scores. Move onto something else. It's the perfect game to jump in and play a few rounds and then pop out.

I can't really say anything bad about the game. For its time (1980) and for how groundbreaking of a title it was, it is impressive to see how well it has held up. Not a perfect game, and not a particularly deep one either, but it is still a game that is quite addicting and a lot of fun to play.

THE GRADE:

B+

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