Apeiron – Ambrosia Software - 1995 - First time playing?: No, played as a teen

I ummed and ahhed for months as to if I was even going to cover Apeiron. Not because it’s bad, but because well, I don’t know how much there even is to say about Centipede, um I mean, Apeiron. You played Centipede? Then you’ve played Apeiron. This goes for a lot of the other early releases in Ambrosia’s library too. Maelstrom is Asteroids, Swoop is Galaxian, Bubble Trouble is Pengo and Barrack is Jezzball. These releases had a purpose for sure, they were released during 1992 through to 1996, a point in history where emulation wasn't nearly as accessible as it has become today. As such there’s convenience to shareware remakes of these games that Mac owners may want to play again but don't have access to them anymore for one reason or another, or maybe they don’t want to just have to keep spending all of their pocket change at the one fish and chips store that inexplicably still has a Pengo arcade cabinet set up. You can have them installed on your primary computer, ready to load up for a quick game whenever you want, and with low system requirements they can run on nearly anything, no dedicated gaming machine required. But now we’re in 2023, where a game having a Mac OS 9 port isn’t convenient in the slightest, but instead quite possibly the most obtuse way you could think of playing the game in question short of a Gizmondo port, so the sales pitch doesn’t really work as well here.

In spite of all of that, I can not deny, Apeiron lives rent free in my head and I can not get it out. It remains one of the first games I install on any Mac OS 9 install, always near the top of alphabetical lists. The amount of times I’ve stared at my desktop trying to decide what to play and just defaulted to Apeiron is uncountable. I think in reviewing this I’ll be exorcising some mental demons from my brain. So, what caused it to stick in my mind all of this time? In short, utterly unhinged humour and some of the most spectacularly obnoxious sound design in the world.

You play as a crystal shard from the shattered remains of a looking glass that you tried and failed to jump through, which your soul is now trapped inside and has landed into a mushroom patch. This is the home of Cheech the Pentipede and his friends, who want to destroy you and suck out your essence from the shard. You can not defeat the Pentipede. As the FAQ document included with the game states, “In the end, death comes to us all'', so by starting the game you have damned yourself to your soul being consumed by the Pentipede. Maybe he actually smokes your essence, the game over screen shows him taking a puff of something on a hookah pipe so maybe he inhales your life force to get blazed. It doesn’t elaborate much, if you haven’t gathered.

Your crystal is equipped with XQJ-37, a plasma blaster made of busted Amiga parts which can fire one projectile on screen at a time. So you’re not defenceless, but make no mistake, nothing can kill the Pentipede. You can squish him into green bug guts but he’ll come back next wave. The Pentipede will start at the top of the screen walking left and right, moving down a row and turning the other way when he hits either a mushroom or the edge of the screen. Every time you shoot the Pentipede he loses a segment of his body, splits into two separate Pentipedes and leaves a mushroom behind, and the round is cleared once you’ve destroyed all the segments. He is accompanied by his buddies Groucho the Flick, Larry the Scobster and Gordon the Gecko. Groucho behaves like the flea from Centipede, descending in a straight line from the top of the screen to the bottom while placing mushrooms behind him as he descends. If you shoot him he screams in high-pitched screechy agony and is the only enemy to have red blood, so that’s pretty fun. Larry the Scobster doesn’t behave like the scorpion from Centipede as you might expect, but instead he’s Apeiron’s equivalent of Centipede’s spider, moving horizontally across the bottom third of the screen in an attempt to crash into your crystal. He also screams when you shoot him and the bestiary states that he needs therapy with absolutely zero further elaboration, so use your imagination on what mental anguish he’s been going through lately. Gordon the Gecko meanwhile is the actual scorpion equivalent in this game. He stinks real bad and his B.O. is literally poison, infecting any mushrooms he comes in contact with as he crawls horizontally across the screen. When Cheech the Pentipede comes in contact with a poison mushroom he’ll immediately start plummeting in a vertical straight line down to the bottom of the screen. There's also a UFO that occasionally spawns in and destroys mushrooms in her path, and while she is hard to hit, doing so awards you with the most points of any enemies in the game.

Obviously mechanically everything I just described is copy and pasted from Centipede, but you’re likely also getting a sense now of this game’s bizarre vibe and sense of humour. This level of silliness is pretty standard for most of Ambrosia’s games, the darker tone of Escape Velocity was the exception rather than the rule. If the weird characters and the comedic existentialism didn't convince you of the degree of silliness this game is on, then maybe the sound effects will instead. Not only do you have the screams of agony mentioned before, but then you also have voice clips of your protagonist shouting out "YEAAAHHH!" and "hoo-ha!" upon clearing a stage, "WHOO-HOO-HOO!" upon getting a powerup, and most bizarrely of all, the sound of a woman orgasming every time you get a bonus multiplier. The rest of the sound effects are cartoony and exaggerated from the squish sounds heard when you shoot the Pentipede, the siren when the UFO spawns in and the springy sounds of the powerup coins bouncing across the screen.

These sound effects are… obnoxious. Really really obnoxious. I bet parents hated them, and not just for the inappropriate erotic moaning. The sound effects are super loud and just harsh and abrasive on the ears to begin with. The amount of screaming that ensues when shooting a bunch of Grouchos and Larrys in a row is excessive and high pitched, and then the UFO siren comes along and is twice as loud as every other sound effect. They're the best part of the game. No, seriously, I love these sound effects so much, they're so awful that they wrap around to being immensely satisfying to me. When I'm causing chaos in this game, Apeiron makes sure I feel that chaos and lets me know the destruction I'm causing with a cluster of chaotic over-the-top sound effects stacked on top of each other. I'm… so confused about this. I want to say the sound design is awful but if I love it this much and find it genuinely satisfying and think it actually enhances the game immensely, can I even call the sound design bad at that point? Ironic or not it's absolutely achieving its intended purpose in enhancing the game and when reviewing Apeiron as a game that can only be seen as a positive. I'm going to be debating this until I die, maybe I'm not exorcising those mental demons after all. Oh well, those demons need a home too.

Let's talk about those powerups now, as that is actually something new to Apeiron that wasn't present in Centipede. They're actually called Yummies in this game to be accurate. Whenever you destroy a mushroom it has a random chance of dropping a coin. Or sometimes you get really lucky and it drops a whole bunch of coins that fill up the whole bottom third of the screen instead. It's all fairly standard stuff, rapidfire, a shield, the ability to pass through mushrooms and control your shots mid-trajectory. They're almost a little too powerful to be honest, you get a bit of that Gradius syndrome with how hard it can be to recover after you lose a life and all of your power-ups you've grown reliant on are lost as well, unless you have YummyLock which allows you to keep your powerups upon death. Regardless, the game is pretty easy with those powerups, definitely much easier than Centipede. This game is also extremely generous with extra lives, it's possible to get them from Yummies but also you get more as you reach score thresholds as well, so it's very common for you to max out the lives counter and not even be able to earn more because you have more than the game can count. So, in order to prevent the player from just being untouchable, Ambrosia introduced some extremely cheap tricks just to mess with the player.

It's all to do with the mushrooms. While usually just obstacles that can get in your line of fire but also occasionally reward you with Yummies, later in the game when you shoot a mushroom it has a random chance to burp and fall off the screen, during which if it collides with your crystal you'll die instantly from contact damage. This is fine, honestly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying burps are funny, but also a burp being accompanied by a mushroom just giving up and leaving the game and potentially even killing you on the way out is very funny to me. It's also not just a hazard, as you can earn more points by shooting the mushroom in mid-air to juggle it until it pops, awarding you with much more points than the measly 1 point you earn from shooting mushrooms otherwise. Once you know to look out for the burping mushrooms they're simple enough to deal with and don't result in many cheap deaths at all. Where it really gets straight up unfair however is when the mushrooms start reflecting shots even later into a game. Sometimes a mushroom will take zero damage from a shot and just send it flying back at you at high speed with a cartoony ricochet sound effect. These reflected projectiles are VERY fast, coming back at you at the same speed they were travelling at when you fired them, and you have less than a second to react in most instances. Not only does the suddenness and unpredictability of the projectiles reflecting back at you already make things difficult, also introducing the possibility of instant death where you're given no chance to react if you shoot a mushroom you're right next to and it instantly reflects your shot back at you, especially common if you have the powerup that lets your crystal pass through mushrooms, but because the reflected shots use the exact same sprite as all your other fired shots, they very easily blend into the other fired projectiles and are hard to see as a result. While Apeiron is much easier than Centipede, it also often feels much cheaper, solely down to those reflective mushrooms. But hey, at least some of the other mushrooms let you have an acid trip when you shoot them, causing the screen to flash rainbow colours and all earned points to be multiplied, which is very cool if you are not epileptic. If you are epileptic, consider trying the Mac OS X port, Apeiron X instead which has an option to turn the flashing off. More on that version later.

Speaking of Apeiron being easier, I got determined to make it to wave 100 for this review. The manual says that the game never ends, but I figured something would happen at wave 100. After all, the wave counter on the HUD is clearly only big enough to display two-digit numbers. Could the game potentially glitch in some way if I made it that far? So I played for a VERY long time to get to that point and I discovered…

That the wave counter just loops around to wave 1 again once you beat wave 99.

Yeah, a bit anticlimactic, that. But at the same time it's also fascinating since the game actually doesn't run out of new backdrops that it switches to every few waves until after wave 100, meaning that even though the wave counter only goes up to 99, you technically can't see everything in Apeiron until a few dozen more levels after wave 99. They programmed graphics you would only see after wave 99 but also decided that they didn't need to program a counter that could display any number higher than 99, absolutely wild to me.

Okay, so that's all, right? What more can I say, it's Centipede but unhinged, it plays well and controls well with the mouse but you get the vibe of what this game is just by the screenshots. We're done here, right?

HAAAAAAAAIL IL PALAZZO!

So Ambrosia Software's website hosted fan made mods as downloadable add-ons for their games, free extras hosted by the original devs. Apeiron later got a Mac OS X enhanced port once Mac OS 9 fell out of relevance, which also featured a selection of mods on its page. Among those mods? Of all things, an Excel Saga conversion. The fact that this was on the official Apeiron page has lived rent free in my mind ever since.

If you don't know Excel Saga, well, congrats on missing the AMV Hell era of the online anime fandom. It's kind of impossible to describe, in short it's an anime about a chaotic gremlin called Excel and her sickly bestie Hyatt attempting to take over the world for their master, Lord Il Palazzo, while constantly on the verge of starving due to being so broke and unsuccessful in their world domination schemes and always being on the verge of eating their pet dog. That's the closest you can get to a "plot" with Excel Saga but even that isn't doing it justice, the show really just does absolutely whatever it feels like, rapidly changing genres from episode to episode and having its lead characters die repeatedly, only to have the will of the universe itself bring them back to life. Infamously, when the series was coming to an end, the final episode was intentionally made so chaotic, violent, sexual and generally objectionable that it couldn't even be aired on television, taking a finale and instead forcibly turning it into a cancellation. It's… Excel Saga. It can only be described as itself, and what it is is Excel Saga. A lot of it doesn't really translate well as the show is actually filled with a lot of social commentary and satire, making the act of being a Westerner watching Excel Saga akin to what I imagine it's like for someone from Japan to watch South Park.

What does this have to do with Apeiron? Absolutely nothing. And because of that, it's the perfect video game adaptation of Excel Saga. The show is so weird that frankly the only way you could make a video game adaptation feel like Excel Saga is to make something that is just inherently baffling in the fact that it exists at all, and I think a mod for a completely forgotten Mac OS X port of a Mac OS 9 Centipede clone that requires an ancient computer unsuitable for anything but weird obscure games like this is the perfect Excel Saga adaptation. This is canon as far as I'm concerned, I'm calling this the actual official Excel Saga video game. The sound effects are even more obnoxious with Excel screaming constantly through all of gameplay, the sprites are small and hard to make out, not helped by the background image of Excel having taken the proudest dump in the world which is too busy of an image for a background and sprites easily blend into it, the yummies are replaced with Excel's dog, images are badly tiled and broken up as a result, it's a mess and it's so damn charming. Everything about it just radiates the energy of early 2000s Geocities anime fan sites and you can tell it was very much made with love for the source material. It even comes with a little HTML mission briefing written in character as Il Palazzo to serve as the manual for the game. If you happen to be one of the few people on the face of this corrupt world who watched Excel Saga, own a PowerPC Mac computer, happen to have a registered copy of specifically version 1.0.0 of Apeiron X on it as it won't work on version 1.0.3 and have always loved it but wished you got to eat more dogs in it, then I highly recommend the Apeiron X 1.0.0 Excel Saga mod.

This was my first review of a Mac OS X game on this entire site. I think it's the perfect start.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 22nd September 2023