The Closeout Warrior

Centipede is one of the old classic games that people hold in abject reverence. Everyone and their grandma has heard of Centipede, and they will likely tell you that it’s one of the best games of the 1980’s. I played it, and I didn’t really like it.

Centipede is a game about destroying centipedes in a garden of mushrooms. You play the part of some kind of thingus that can move around on the bottom portion of the screen and shoot toward the top. At the top of the screen are centipedes of various lengths and colors that work their way down the screen. They descend slightly when they either hit the edge of the screen or hit one of the mushrooms. Your goal is to shoot all the segments of the centipede and proceed to the next level. You have two problems: you shoot the head segment and it turns into a mushroom, making the centipede descend a level, and if you shoot the middle, the middle part turns into a mushroom, the centipede splits into two where you shot it, and both parts come down independent of each other.

Compounding this problem are the spiders that flit around on the bottom part of the screen at irregular intervals. They touch you, you = dead. Of course, you get more points the closer the spiders are to you when you shoot them, but their erratic movements make them particularly dangerous.

Later on, there are fleas that drop from the top of the screen, littering it with more mushrooms, which makes the centipede descend faster. And scorpions that poison mushrooms. A centipede that touches a poison mushroom will immediately head directly toward the bottom of the screen. What fun!

The game was designed to use a trackball, and is really the only way to play it, joysticks don’t really do the game justice. That’s assuming, of course, that you can actually want to play this game.

I was never, uh… fortunate enough to play Toobin’ in the arcades, I had to wait until it came out on the various compilations of arcade games for the home. Now that I’ve gotten a few rounds of this game under my belt, I still don’t really know what the appeal of this game was supposed to be.

Toobin’ takes the… ’sport’ of lazily floating down a river in an inner tube, and seeks to recreate it in video game form. Now, just that would not make a particularly engaging game, so you have obstacles to avoid, flags to paddle through for points, and soda cans to collect. You can paddle left or right (or both at the same time for straight ahead action!) and use the cans you collect as weapons. If you can make it down to the end of the river without having all of your reserve inner tubes popped, you can continue on to the next, more difficult mission.

My main beef with this game, other than the completely inane concept, was that it was very difficult to control your character. being able to paddle left and right while fighting the currents and water hazards was just an exercise in futility.

I cut my arcade pseudo-dancing teeth on Dance Dance Revolution, it was the first game of its kind that I played, and it’s the one that I have the most experience with. Like anything that’s remotely popular, this game has spawned imitators that have tried to expand and improve upon DDR’s formula of stomping on arrows in time to a silly song. One of the apparently more popular ones is the Pump it Up series, and recently I had a chance to play one of the games in the series: Pump it Up: Premiere.

Pump it Up: Premiere stays pretty close to the system introduced in DDR: arrows scroll up from the bottom of the screen and when they cross the line at the top of the screen, you have to stomp on the corresponding arrow on your footpad, in time with the music, of course.

Where the game diverges slightly, other than the almost unilaterally terrible selection of songs, is that the arrows are not the up, down, left, and right found in DDR, but they are in the four corners, up-left, up-right, down-left, and down-right, with a 5th button in the center. My understanding is that this helps people ‘be more expressive’ when they’re pseudo-dancing. I didn’t notice myself expressing myself more, but I did feel like I was a little more bow-legged than normal trying to stretch my legs to the four corners of the pad. I also noticed that since I was ‘trained’ on DDR that I couldn’t find the arrows most of the time, so I missed the steps quite a lot, and managed to fail after only one song.

I haven’t yet decided if I want to try and pay another dollar to play one more song, the price to entertainment time ratio was a little low for my taste. Well, that and the terrible covers of terrible songs.

Do! Run Run is the last original game of the Mr. Do! legacy, and perhaps is the most complex (although that’s not really saying much). I also found it to be tied for the worst game in the series, tied with Wild Ride. The best, incidentally, stands at Castle.

Mr. Do! finds himself on a multi-tiered playfield covered with dots and populated by monsters. Mr. Do! now has the ability to draw a line behind him, and if he completely encloses a group of dots within his lines, they turn into cherries. Cherries are worth more points, and facilitate regeneration of Mr. Do!’s ball. A ball which hasn’t been seen since the first game. You can use the ball or the precariously balanced logs to blow up or squish the monsters on the playfield respectively.

The problem I had with this game is that it tried to be too many things. Is it Pac-Man? Is it Qix? I don’t know, but I found it to be a mishmash of previously-explored game ideas that doesn’t really work.

I don’t think I’m going to pretend to understand the Mr. Do universe any more. Mr. Do, after both picking cherries underground and ridding his seven-story castle of monsters, makes his way to a series of roller-coasters. Roller Coasters with cherries and ladders. Functional roller coasters that Mr. Do must navigate and collect the cherries scattered about, all while trying to get to the exit (at the top of the coaster, of course) without getting squished by the cars.

I now understand that you don’t have to collect all the cherries to finish the course, which would have made the game slightly easier for my novice hands to make progress. Heck, this knowledge might have given me incentive to play this game more than once, but I seriously doubt it.

Mr. Do! is a clown who apparently has a thing for cherries. Cherries that are underground in groups of eight. and that are guarded by these weird red monsters with big heads (evidently called ‘Mini Dinos’).

Mr. Do! is a fantastic digger. He can create paths in the dirt with relative ease in any of the four cardinal directions, but he has to take care to make them both easy enough to get the cherries (if you can get an entire group of eight all at once, you get extra points) and convoluted enough to befuddle the unicorns that are on your trail. You could use the inexplicably-placed gigantic apples to strategically crush them, or you could throw a ball at them (he’s a clown, of course he has a ball (sorry)).

If you collect all the cherries in the stage, you move on to the next one. Clear enough stages and you get a goofy little cutscene. The first cutscene appears after you clear three rounds… I’ve never managed to get to a cutscene, but it should be noted that I haven’t played the game since I was less than a dozen years old.

If you have a female’s voice that sounds like it’s coming out of a blown speaker that’s underwater and covered with that filler they put in stuffed animals saying, “PREPARE TO QUALIFY!” then you know you’re playing Pole Position.

Pole Position is technically a racing game, even though you’re only really racing against the clock and the score counter. You pick your track from one of the three difficulties, (more difficult = more curves, natch), and race around until you run out of time. You have a super high performance car with super simple controls: gas, brake, steering wheel, low gear and high gear. You get more time by finishing laps, and you lose time by touching anything that’s not ground. You lose time by touching another car or a billboard and having your car explode into a giant fireball. You’ll respawn without a scratch, but you lose your momentum and precious Time Units tick away. I’m never sure where these other cars came from. You’re alone at the starting line, but as you motor along the track, you’ll come across other drone racers that putter along right in your path at about 25 km/h (yes, it’s in metric).

It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s before I was good enough to actually finish more than zero laps around the course, and I still can’t manage to get the high score on the machine. I suppose it might be time to give this game up. Mostly because I can’t find it in an arcade anywhere.