Millipede arcade game
Developed by Atari®

Video games lost me around 1985 or so, when things became too complicated for my feeble brain to keep up with. Used to be that all you'd have to do would be move a joystick around and shoot at shit, at the most … then, gradually, it came to be that you'd have to also be jumping, kicking, spinning around, reloading, punching in complex patterns on buttons and balls and doo-dads, wearing virtual reality visors and motion-sensor gloves, plugging into the Matrix through the back of your neck, shelling out millions of dollars for a spaceship, loading your body down with dozens of weapons and secret maps, beaming at light speed through terrifying nightmarescapes, and mortgaging your actual house so that you could afford some property near a magical river in a world that doesn't really exist.

Video games scare me. I can only do one thing at a time. Point, then shoot. If I'm really on top of my game, I can sometimes manage both at once.

Which is what made running into Millipede recently such a pleasure. This game grinds up against the furthest reaches of my gaming capacity. It's basically Centipede all jacked up on a deadly mixture of designer steroids, Red Bull, and Incan hallucinogens. Fortunately for the encounter, so was I.

In Centipede, your task was to shoot apart an advancing centipede, which would fragment into multiple advancing parts when shot in the thoraci, and to contend with occasional spiders and fleas which appeared randomly and boosted the chaos factor. There was nothing relaxing about this game, but at least it was somewhat controllable, as with my one roach-infested college apartment … it took some stamina, but I could contain the epidemic through dilligent, diverse, and crafty insecticide.

Millipede, though, starts you right off in a seemingly unwinnable quagmire of absolute infestation. It gets faster and more difficult the further you get, yes … but it starts fast and difficult, so I invariably found myself quickly overrun by the crazed assortment of malicious bugs: the millipede, plus spiders, dragonflies, earwigs, bees, mosquitos, beetles, and inchworms.

So that the odds aren't stacked too far out of balance, DDT bombs are planted in the mushroom field that you can shoot at to unleash a murderous cloud that will knock out any nearby crawly things.

The pace is frantic, the screen claustrophobic, and the gameplay supremely exciting in the same terrifying way as rolling baseheads in a crackhouse. I had to take three Xanaxes immediately afterward just to cope with the horror. Well, I didn't have to, and I was going to anyway, but you get the point.

I hardly mastered Millipede – that is, I think I made it to about level three before being overtaken like E.G. Marshall in Creepshow – so I'm not prepared to say how much more insane (or, perhaps, repetitive) the game might get later on. I was happy to just stick in there for a few minutes, like Mattie Stepanek on a mechanical bull. Maybe one day I'll be able to work my way up to, like, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Review by La Fée