A great shareware game for the Mac, released by Ambrosia Software in 1995. It was, for all intents and purposes, a Centipede clone, but it was damned addictive. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Centipede, it goes like this: you control a small mobile something (is it a ship? a scooter? a marital aid?) that zips around a mushroom field and shoots bullets that streak up the screen, unguided. Without power ups, you get one bullet onscreen at a time, so aim well. From the top of the screen, a centipede is winding his way down the mushrooms, descending one row and changing direction every time he bumps into one. Five bullets will destroy a 'shroom, one will destroy a segment of a centipede--or, more accurately, turn that segment into a mushroom. If you chop him in half, the rear half grows a head and continues autonomously, so chew him up from the front or the back. Once the centipede is gone, you progress to the next level. One bump from anything but a 'shroom, and you're dead, next life, restart the level.

To aid you in your quest, mushrooms would occasionally change color and offer power ups: 3x scoring, 5x scoring, 10x scoring, temporary invulnerability, extra life, and the coveted rapid fire. Enough points and you gain an extra life. With rapid fire you could clear practically every mushroom on the board. Occasionally, if you walked by my dorm room in 1995, you'd hear me shout "rock and roll!"--this meant I had grabbed rapid fire, and used it to secure a temporary invulnerability shroom and perhaps even a scoring multiplier. In this state, one could clear a level of mushrooms with impunity, as long as you left a few segments of centipede moving around.

The addiction to the game is in its fast and knee-jerk gameplay, but also in the little touches: the centipede-type critter appeared caricatured in several intermediary screenshots sitting on a Day Glo mushroom and smoking a hookah, a la Through the Looking Glass, and always had derisive laughter for you when your--ship? lawnmower? spider? laser?--got destroyed by the inevitable progress of longer and longer arthropods down your screen. Even if you could nail the centipede, the scorpion that popped in from the side and the... bugs that dropped from the top of the screen and ricocheted around would eventually nail you.