Previous Next

Subtitled The Centipede's Revenge, this seems to be a version of Centipede, albeit a good one.

If you've spent the last year stuck in a compost heap, in Centipede you're based at the foot of the screen and must shoot the wriggling segmented creature as it descends. It zig-zags in a straightforward manner until diverted by a mushroom or other obstacle. Hit a body segment rather than its head and it splits into two new creatures.

Visions appears to have caught the increasingly contagious disease (Cassetium Garbagium) in which you fill the cassette insert with this and that but forget to include instructions - rather important in this case as after you've selected the Kempston or keyboard option you're invited to 'Select Speed 1-5'. Do that and you're straight into a game without knowing the control keys.

The game itself is a good colourful version of the arcade classic, and that's more important than initial irritations. You have three lives, with a bonus every 20,000 points, the H key will hold the game and there's the essential Hall of Fame at the end.

Your laser can move in eight directions using the joysticks or, more awkwardly, two keys simultaneously on the keyboard, and it can patrol as far as about one quarter the way up the screen. Spiders bounce across the bottom in an unpredictable manner - sometimes staying for ages and then suddenly pouncing on you if you don't see them off.

From time to time a snail will crawl across the top, looking so like Brian from The Magic Roundabout that I found it hard to shoot it, and there are little bugs which descend leaving mushroom trails behind them, and which appear to be indestructible.

The five-speed options range from the extremely fast to the tediously slow, which should satisfy everyone, but the game could have done with more sound than incessant laser pings. Also, a rapid fire option would have saved a lot of wear and tear on the old digits.

Versions of Centipede for the Spectrum are about as numerous as, well, legs on a centipede, and this one's as good as most if you get that uncontrollable urge to kill a creepie-crawlie.