Dadchallenge Centipede
@Marigio300X
Written by:
@Otyugra
(This review was written based on the download version found on this thread on July 7th 2016.)
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___When I purchased
Atari's Greatest Hits Volume Two for the DS from a game rental store yesterday, I had no idea it would come in handy with writing a review. Having never played
Centipede before (like most people who weren't alive during the first console generation or the golden age of the arcade), I decided to play
Millipede on my new game collection and looked up info about the predecessor before playing this "demo."
Centipede, for those who don't know, is like the more complex and awkward uncle to
Space Invaders. Question is: is this remake worth your time or is it dwarfed by the game it tries to remake?
___The very second you finish downloading the game, it starts playing, and because there is no menus, the game literally starts. Basically, you are a white thing-a-ma-jig who can shoot, and you play the role of someone shooting at giant bugs and mushrooms. Centipedes zigzag down to you while spiders bounce around you, and some other bug causes even more mushrooms to spawn through out the field. Like the original, this is an arcade game to it's core; it is hard, addictive, and repetitive. There is enough going on that it is easy to see why this gameplay survives the test of time compared to games of the same era like
Qix. Kind of like in
Asteroid, this is an arcade game where you need to desperately look everywhere at once and time your shoots absolutely perfectly. Trying to shoot the little buggers in this remake is quite hard which for most will have the game be a little less fun and a little more frustrating. This is intentional by design and it keeps the game tense for when the the centipedes get closer and shooting gets easier. This tension is good, but in an era where there are thousands of freeware games to choose from, I would sooner go to the moon than choose a game that is as constantly frustrating as this. Arcade games sometimes ran opposite to the philosophy of powering up the player, like this one which laughs at the players by showing them that they can't even shoot at a stupid centipede. As a stand-alone game, this is repetitive, frustrating, and overly simple by today's standards.
___The graphics are basically the same as the decades-old arcade game yet worse! I think the creator made the mistake of changing the alias of the graphics, because everything is blurry which looks real bad when dealing with enlarged pixels. It is like what you would see if you got way too close to a texture in a first person Dreamcast game. You can tell what you are looking at, but there isn't much to see. Most of the screen is either blackness, or red and green mushrooms (what a terrible duo to use in a sprite; those are exact opposites and literally bother the eye). On top of that, the score sticks out awkwardly, unlike in the arcade version. The sad thing is, I would have preferred the Atari 2600's demake graphics over the ones actually found in this remake. On a completely different note, the sound effects are spot on and one of the highlights of this game.
Dadchallenge has no actual music though.
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@Marigio300X I appreciate you keeping things intact (since this is a remake and that is implied as a rule to the challenge), but I can't help but think about the many little changes you could have made to salvage this game. You could have fixed the colors of the mushrooms, changed aliasing, adding a background (a la
Asteroids Deluxe), added a start menu, and so forth. Even if you made all of those little changes in the one week you had to make this, I still would not want to play this game, as it is not even in my top five arcade games from that era.
In summary, I would
not recommend this game to anyone unless you are a huge fan of
Centipede and also so-happen to wonder what would happen if that game was slightly worse. Despite that, I feel like this is a good remake (aside from the missing content and glitchy centipede movement) that the creator no doubt but a lot of time and effort into trying to get it to be semi-polished.
@Marigio300X thank you for sharing this game with us here on the Game Maker Community Forum. I sincerely hope you my feedback helped and I hope you continue to work on this game. To be afraid to take creative liberties and make improvements where you see fit.
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The opinions and points of view offered in this review are not the opinions and points of view of the GMC Rad Reviewers, but from the author of the review. We are all humans; as such, we might have made a mistake or misinterpreted something when playing your game, so please share your thoughts of this review with us.
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