Atarian
Issue Number 3
September / October 1989

Millipede (2600, 7800, XE)

An army of menacing millipedes - cousings of the famed Centipede - has invaded your garden patch, and you must shoot darts at them to rid your plot of these pesky Diplopods. But wait! The millipedes aren't the only villainous insects you have to destroy. Jumping spiders, buzzing bees, bouncing beetles, mosquitos, dragonflies, inchworms, and earwigs all have unique and deadly powers of their own. Initially, mushrooms are scattered about your garden patch.

In this home version of the arcade hit, you use a standard joystick controller (or optionally, in the XE version, a Trak-Ball controller) to move around the bottom quarter of the screen. Millipedes attack from the top of the screen, marching back and forth across your patch until they reach the bottom. When a millipede touches a mushroom, it reverses its horizontal path across the screen. You get 100 points for shooting the head of a millipede and 10 points for each body section you hit.

Jumping spiders enter from either side near the bottom. The number of points you earn for hitting a spider - 300, 600, 900, or 1200 - depends on how close it is when you shoot it.

Beetles, worth 300 points, crawl in when you least expect them. They hug the ground, so you have to let them scuttle by and wait until they head for the top of the patch before zapping them.

Swarming insects - mosquitos, bees, and dragonflies - can cause big trouble if you are not alert. Each has a distinctive sound and pattern, and all can generaly be best attacked from the bottom center of the screen - as long as you avoid those pesky spiders.

A video gardener's best friend is his DDT bomb. Pierce it, and you earn an automatic 800 points. Better yet, if you explode it at the right time, the vapor will wipe out any bug it touches and triple the number of pints you would normally earn for zapping that bug.

The number of points you score in a game determines the level at which you can start the next game. If you score 85,000 points, for example, you cans tart your next game at the 70,000 point level. You get a new blaster at 10,000 to 15,000 point increments, and if your bug blasting is fast and accurate, you can score up in the professional horiculturist range of 300,000 pints or more.

- Vicki Vorhees