Champ Centiped-em

When you launch it, a horrifying realization awaits — this is not the Centipede the world knew. It's something completely different, something that would be a joke if the creators actually thought they were being funny. Champ Centiped-em from 1997 tries to be a modernized spinoff of the classic arcade game, except it fails to realize that modern doesn't necessarily mean better.

It's some kind of action game with more or less mangled versions of the original's rules. Instead of a simple premise — stop the centipede from top to bottom — you've got some mix of jumping, shooting, and logic that defies the laws of nature. The play field is confusingly laid out, and when you first encounter the controls, it takes a moment before you realize it's not your eyes deceiving you.

Gameplay revolves around maneuvering yourself somewhere you don't belong while literally everything else can destroy you without consequence. Collisions work however they feel like working, not how they should. The graphics are soulless pixel art, the sounds so subtle you're not even sure the game has audio at all. The controls are unresponsive, and the lag between what you want to do and what actually happens will force you to second-guess every decision.

Why do we remember it? Well, we remember it as a warning — proof that not every indie developer experiment of the nineties led anywhere meaningful. The original was a revolution in the eighties. This is a reminder why the original should have been left effortlessly alone.

Today you'll play it in your browser out of curiosity, just to convince yourself how spectacularly logic can be botched when it had been working perfectly for sixty years prior. It's not incompetence — it's someone thinking they knew a path they clearly didn't.