Black Widow & Centipede, Free On Epic

Monday, Prime Gaming for this month was revealed. Tuesday, Elden Ring topped UK sales charts, while Persona 4 Arena Ultimax has an awful name and will be using rollback netcode. Wednesday, Samuel ran down the Pokémon announcements from earlier in the week, and a week on from invading Ukraine, Russia faces boycotts and sanctions as donations for Ukraine pour in. Thursday, Samuel also gave a rundown of some additions to Xbox Game Pass for early March. Yeah, it is not like anything else has dominated the news for a full week or anything.

Well, I don’t have to set fire to the Epic Games offices, but I am not putting the gasoline away just yet, I can sell it for half a million per drop in the impending nuclear apocalypse. Over on the Epic Games Store this week, you can pick up Black Widow: Recharged, Centipede: Recharged, and the Epic Slayer Kit for Dauntless. Look, I am on a bit of a nostalgia bend recently, but for the life of me, I’d rather bang my head against a wall than play two shooters from 1981 and 82.

The least of my reasoning is that Atari SA (formally called Infogrames) continually wants to ruin good things as the company’s leadership enjoys navel-gazing. Stuck in the past while ruining a good name with cryptocurrency nonsense, this is the same company that spent $34-million on Driv3r, an open world sandbox to rival Rockstar’s $10-million for GTA: San Andreas. They also sold off a majority of their owned properties in the late-00s to early-10s to avoid foreclosure due to bankruptcy, including Total Annihilation, Desperados, Test Drive, Alone in the Dark, 40 Winks, Hogs of War, and Driver. All that is left is Rollercoaster Tycoon, which they drive into the ground regularly, and a metric ton of arcade games.

Why am I not talking about Black Widow and Centipede? Black Widow was a crap film that if you turn off, you’ll enjoy it, but if you give a single brain cell over to it, you’ll see the scripting flaws it has, and you wanted to know about the game, did you? It is a twin-stick shooter about a spider catching things in its web and killing them to get a higher score. I’ve found more in-depth games I’ve created in excrement at the base of my toilet bowl. As for Centipede, it is a grid-based shooter where you try getting a high score, almost as if it was originally an arcade game made to fleece pennies out of the pockets of children.

All this week, you can pick up Black Widow: Recharged, Centipede: Recharged, and the Epic Slayer Kit for Dauntless for free on the Epic Games Store until the 10th of March. Moving on to next week, if you haven’t already gotten Cities: Skylines from a previous two-week Christmas giveaway, next week will be your chance to do so. This will give you all the fun of Troy McClure swearing at traffic, and swearing at a different bit of traffic that you’ve backed up elsewhere. Ahh, the fun that can be had when EA screws up SimCity releases.