Centipede Blast

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Centipede Blast is a free online arcade shooter for one player: a centipede winds down a field of mushrooms and you have one shot in the air at a time. The mechanic the whole genre is built on is that a hit does not chip away at the centipede — it splits it. Shoot a middle segment and the body becomes two shorter ones, each with its own head, each carrying on independently, and the segment you hit turns into a mushroom exactly where it died. So the field the centipede is descending through is built out of your own shots, and a long game gets harder because of how you played the short one. A centipede walks sideways until something blocks it — the wall or a mushroom — then drops a row and turns, which means every mushroom you leave standing is another row it gains. Reaching the floor does not end it either: it turns round and climbs. You may move anywhere in the bottom six rows, mushrooms block you as well, and a spider bounces through that band eating the field you were hiding behind. Heads are worth a hundred and body segments ten, so the greedy shot and the safe shot are rarely the same one. Mushrooms take four hits to clear and are made whole again every time you lose a life. The whole game is a fixed-step simulation on a twenty-five by thirty grid, so the same field plays the same way every time and Replay really does replay it.

How to play Centipede Blast

1. Press Play. A centipede enters at the top and starts winding down through the mushrooms.
2. Move with the arrow keys or WASD, or drag anywhere on the field with a finger. You can move freely in the bottom six rows, which are marked.
3. Shoot with the space bar or the Fire button. Only one shot is in the air at a time, which is why aiming matters more than speed.
4. A hit splits the centipede. The segment you hit becomes a mushroom, and the two halves carry on separately with a head each.
5. A head is worth 100 and a body segment 10 — so shooting the front is worth ten times as much, and is far more dangerous.
6. The centipede walks sideways until the wall or a mushroom stops it, then drops a row and turns. Every mushroom is another row it gains on you.
7. Reaching the bottom does not get rid of it. It turns round at the floor and climbs back up.
8. Mushrooms take four shots to clear and are worth a point each. They block you as well as the centipede, so a thick field boxes you in.
9. A spider bounces through your band every so often, eating mushrooms as it goes. It is worth points and it will kill you on contact.
10. Anything touching you costs a life, and all the chipped mushrooms are made whole again. Three lives and the field is theirs.
11. Clear every segment to finish the wave. The mushrooms stay, so the next wave starts in the field you built.

Tips

• Shoot the head when you can reach it. A hundred points against ten is the whole scoring system, and the head is the segment that is about to reach you.
• Think before you split. Two short centipedes come at you from two directions, and on a crowded field that is worse than one long one.
• Keep a lane clear. Every mushroom you leave standing lets the centipede drop a row sooner, so a column you have cleared is a column it cannot use.
• Do not clear the whole field either. Mushrooms in the upper rows are what turns the centipede away from you — it is the ones near the bottom that hurt.
• Mushrooms block you too. Walking into a pocket you cannot get out of is the most common way to lose a life that was not coming for you.
• Wait for the spider rather than chasing it. It bounces through your band on a fixed path, so let it come to your line instead of leaving yours.
• Losing a life makes every chipped mushroom whole again. Finish the mushroom you started before you take a risk elsewhere.
• The field carries between waves. A wave you cleared by flattening everything leaves you with nothing to hide behind on the next one.

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