'Centipede' worms its way onto Nintendo

By Mike Snider, USA TODAY

The arcade classic Centipede has mutated.

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  Extermination: In Centipede: Infestation, you shoot at bugs while playing as Max, a teen survivor of a nuclear war.

Extermination: In Centipede: Infestation, you shoot at bugs while playing as Max, a teen survivor of a nuclear war.

Centipede: Infestation, due this fall (Atari, $40, for Nintendo Wii and 3DS, estimated rating ages 10-up), reimagines the addictive quarter-magnet from 1980 as a 3-D shooting adventure in which you battle multiple pests.

In the original, vividly colored centipedes shimmied through a field of mushrooms from the top of the screen to the bottom, accelerating as you shot them, segment by segment. "My memory of it was 'I need to stop this bug from coming down the screen.' There was no story or reason," says Atari's Jonathan Moses. "For the time, that was great."

Today's Centipede: Infestation borrows its back story a bit from the post-apocalyptic Fallout as a nuclear war has left a largely uninhabitable landscape. But a few teen orphans wearing protective suits survive. You are a boy named Max.

"You meet up with Maisy, who has this almost magical power over flowers (and) is able to grow in what is otherwise this irradiated wasteland," Moses says. "You follow Maisy through this world and protect her."

Developers at WayForward Technologies (Contra 4) are designing the Wii version to be an arcade-style shooter; players will point the remote at the screen like a gun and use the control stick to maneuver Max. 3DS will use the touchpad to move and other controls to aim and shoot.

In the original ? which has just become available for 99 cents on the Atari Greatest Hits iPad and iPhone App ? when you hit the centipede, mushroom barriers popped up. "In this game, as you kill the different bugs, they drop everything from gun turrets and walled barriers to power-ups for the player," Moses says.

Eventually, you will face off against the Godzilla of centipedes. "There are centipedes, and then there is 'The Centipede,' " he says.

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