The Closeout Warrior

Most of the games for the Atari 2600 were some degree of odd, and Plaque Attack has got to be one of the oddest.

Plaque Attack takes place inside a gigantic mouth with eight gigantic teeth. Your job, as an impossibly-tiny tube of toothpaste is to stop the squadrons of flying foodstuffs from decaying and eventually destroying your beautiful teeth.

Just like real life food, the flying foodstuffs in this game can be brought down and completely obliterated by shots from your tube of toothpaste. If you miss shooting the food, it gloms to a tooth, and will eventually destroy it.

I only played this game one time, and at the time thought it was pretty lame. It was way too easy, and the concept was just silly (and not ’silly in a good way’). However, I now know that it’s a semi-rare game that is sought after by collectors. I can’t fathom why they would want it. I thought it was terrible when I was eight years old, and odds are fairly slim that it’s gotten better with age.

It amazes me that at one time video games had not only nearly completely inscrutable plots, but that the developers developed an entire mythos to explain what the game’s story. A backstory that, in all likelihood, had more text than the actual game’s programming. One such game is Yar’s Revenge.

I’m not going into into the depths of the Yar’s Revenge universe, but suffice it to say that you pilot a ship that’s shaped like some kind of wasp-thing. Your goal is to destroy the Evil Alien Ship on the right side of the screen. Your little pea-shooter won’t actually destroy anything but the blocky force-field surrounding the Evil Ship, so you have to use your Super Weapon. You charge the super weapon for one shot by either touching the Evil Ship, presumably charging the weapon and destroying the ship with its own evilness, or by eating a portion of the force field, thereby charging the weapon and destroying the ship with the power of your ship’s digestive tract. give the ship the ability to become an indestructible Swirl of Death and hurl itself at you, an indestructible ship shaped roughly like a hyphen that relentlessly pursues you, and a ’safe zone’ about in the middle of the screen and you have something resembling a game.

Let’s just suppose for a moment that you wanted to jazz up the tired old paper game Tic-Tac-Toe and bring into the age of video games. Let’s also suppose that it’s the 1980’s, so you don’t have a machine that’s really capable of doing a whole lot more than drawing vague shapes on the screen. What do you do? One option might be to move the whole games into the realm of three dimensions.

Drawing a a tic-tac-toe board so that it looks like it leans back in the distance is pretty trivial once you know a bit about perspectives, vanishing points, and… chiaroscuro shading. Now if this were just regular standard tic-tac-toe in three dimensions it would be pretty awesome, but the developers decided to take it two steps forward.

Step 1: Playing on a 3×3 grid is so last century. They updated the standard grid up to 4×4.

Step 2: Why stop at just one 4×4 grid? Let’s stack four of them on top of each other. Futuristic.

The game plays pretty much like regular old boring tic-tac-toe, except that you can win the game by getting four in a row across, down, or in a straight line through the grids (like a mark in the top-left corner of all four grids, or one in the top-left of the top grid, one in the second-to-left square in the top row on the second grid, etc.).

Does all of this sound fun? If so, you can use a pencil and paper to draw your own grids and recreate the experience. I think about five or so minutes will sufficiently recreate the level of fun you could ever get from this game.