Centipede (Arcade)

While early console games would introduce the concept of different difficulty settings where players can adjust the difficulty based on their skill level, early arcade games relied on a different form of difficulty control. Centipede does feature some settings the arcade owner can tweak like the amount of lives and how many points are needed to earn a new one, but the real way Centipede’s difficulty changes is by the player’s influence over the play field. By controlling the condition of the area the centipede moves through, the player is the one who adjusts the degree of challenge in this arcade shooter.

Controlling a gun at the bottom of the play field called the Bug Blaster, the player moves it around through the use of the uncommon control method of a track ball embedded into the arcade cabinet. The track ball is actually an excellent fit for this game’s movement, the precision of the rolling ball allowing you to move rather freely around the decently sized rectangular space at the bottom of the screen. While the area you can move isn’t marked clearly, you’ll gradually get a feel for it and be able to move around at variable speeds and rather smoothly make diagonal movements thanks to the sensitivity of the track ball. While Centipede can get difficult, it didn’t necessarily need this degree of control for the player to be effective, but by having it you are better able to survive even longer and react to the often speedy bugs who try to invade your space and kill you.

Every round of Centipede begins with the deadly centipede appearing at the top of the screen and moving back and forth as it makes its way down to the bottom where your Bug Blaster resides. The centipede reverses its course whenever it comes in contact with either the edge of the screen or a mushroom, the play field littered with the little fungi and serving as your way of controlling the pace of the action. There is usually a pretty large amount of mushrooms in play, so many you can’t conceivably clear them all away, but you can open fire on them to gradually break them down. However, each one takes four shots to completely break apart, and while your gun does fire very quickly, you can’t conceivably clear away every mushroom while also dealing with the centipede and its cohorts. However, clearing away certain mushrooms will mean the centipede takes longer to reach you, and clearing out openings in the mushrooms to make way for your shots can allow for you to land multiple shots on the centipede in a row quite quickly. The centipede is made up of 10 or 12 segments that all must be destroyed, but if you shoot it any place besides the head or tail, it will split into two separate centipedes who might even move towards you at different speeds. What’s more, when a centipede segment is destroyed, it will often leave a mushroom in its wake, giving the rest of the body a barrier to bounce off of in its continued quest to reach you. If the centipede or one of its split off spawn reaches the bottom of the screen, it does need to touch you to properly kill you, giving you a chance to shoot it apart at close range if you’re skillful enough, but it’s no pushover. It will move back and forth in your movement area, calling in new centipede parts to make this close range battle even more challenging.

The skirmish with the centipede is fittingly the main fight of Centipede, but there are other bugs who appear to complicate the battle. The spider is the most common creature. While a centipede is only truly replaced at the start of a new level, spiders hop into the play field constantly, bouncing around the lower regions of the screen and threatening to kill you with their deadly touch. They go down to a single shot, but their speed is what makes them deadly, the player having to keep on the move to survive while balancing the main objective as well. Almost as soon as one spider is dead another will appear, and since it ignores the mushrooms, its speed can’t be controlled. Because you fire rapidly though you can manage the spider incursion and still destroy fungi on the play field to hinder the centipede, but two other arthropods will appear from time to time to mess with the mushrooms. The flea drops down from above quickly, the speedy creature not really a concern when it comes to damage since it disappears if it hits the bottom of the screen, but the little bug will deposit plenty of new mushrooms in a column, essentially building a wall that will speed up the centipede’s descent if you don’t deal with it quickly.

Perhaps the most bothersome bug though is the scorpion. Tearing across the screen horizontally, the scorpion’s fly-by poses no physical threat to you, but every mushroom it touches as it passes is poisoned. Poison mushrooms pose a huge threat, the centipede immediately plummeting downward if it makes contact with the discolored fungi. This rapid descent completely bypasses your control of the play field, the only way to prevent it being things like shooting down the scorpion when it appears or clearing out the poison mushrooms before they can be touched, but luckily the poison does not linger permanently, meaning that soon those mushrooms will go back to basic barriers. There is a fairly simple way to deal with a poisoned centipede if need be though, the player only needing to hit the creature’s head with a shot to end its plummet and revert it back to its typical tamer behavior, but with many things to keep track of, your chance to do so might just be when it’s already entered your personal space.

Like many old arcade games, the goal of Centipede is to earn as many points as you can before you lose all your lives. There are no real levels to Centipede, the play area changing colors to indicate you’ve made progress but the new stage simply sends in a new centipede rather than adding any differences to play. Interestingly enough though, the mushrooms stick around until they are destroyed, meaning that if you aren’t doing any gardening, soon the screen will be filled with tons of mushroom caps. This is where it becomes vital to prune the battlefield from time to time, the amount of mushrooms becoming untenable if you only focus on clearing out the bugs to earn points. You can’t just trap your main foe by having too many mushrooms around either, the centipede forcing its way through if it has to. Centipede’s play is about keeping the play area as clear as you can manage while not losing focus on the goal at hand, and with the speed of all the deadly bugs after you, you’ll need to be speedy and react on the fly to effectively manage the mushrooms between blasting bugs. At the same time though, you can get creative and only leave mushrooms that herd the centipede in a way that makes it easier to kill. After all, if there is a long shaft the centipede heads down, you can easily wait below it and fire repeatedly to get plenty of hits on the creature’s front end, and by maintaining the shaft you might be able to keep up the tactic for quite a while. The mushroom management is what makes Centipede more than a straightforward shooter, and so long as you’ve got a track ball in good condition, its high speed action make for an entertaining visit in the arcade.

THE VERDICT: Centipede’s quick action and multiple bug types make it a constantly involved shooter that pairs well with the precision of a track ball, but the element that makes it more than just a plain bug shooter is the mushroom management. The mushrooms control the pace of play and level of danger, so a smart player can identify which ones to blast apart and customize the play field into something that matches their game plan. With so many enemies around, keeping your play area the way you like it isn’t easy, but giving the player the means to adjust the difficulty of the mushroom layout lets Centipede stay interesting and involved without having to create new levels or obstacles.

And so, I give Centipede for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. Controlling the difficulty yourself is a feature I think helps a lot of older arcade games be more than the same elements constantly coming at you. The mushrooms in Centipede aren’t as flashy as its monstrous centipede or as dangerous as the bouncing spiders, but the flow of play is dependent on their placement and your ability to destroy them or prevent their poisoning is important to managing the time you have to defeat the centipede. Even without changes beyond coloration between the rounds of battle with the bugs, Centipede’s difficulty continues to climb, the frequent appearance of fleas and scorpions preventing you from having too much control without completely robbing you the option to make tactical breaks in the mushroom patch to guide the centipede into your shots. Even if you aren’t thinking too much about what you’re doing though, the track ball gives you plenty of control so that you can stay in there and react to whatever troubles the mushroom placement brings. Like many of the more popular arcade games, Centipede keeps itself fresh despite its simple gameplay loop and avoids stagnation, in this case through an interactive engagement with with how difficult the game can be.

Centipede earns its spot as an arcade classic by valuing the player’s impact on the play field. The placement of mushrooms will rarely look alike between different play sessions all because of how tied it is to the way the player approaches the action. It’s still simple at its core, but the difficulty of Centipede manages to be both challenging and adjustable without any menu settings getting involved, making for an arcade game that feels like more than just straightforward baddie blasting.