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.