Molar Maul (ZX Spectrum)

Thus far my efforts to get better acquainted with the British microcomputer gaming scene have gone rather poorly. Repeatedly I came across games defined by poor controls and a reliance on memorization through constant unforgiving deaths even when I would try to play the best regarded games for the system. Longevity for a game on a system like the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 seemed to come from necessitating constant play to learn how to even make small amounts of progress and I was worried that my earnest efforts to find an enjoyable old game from this time period would keep leading to me trotting out microcomputer games just to have to tear them down. Then, to my great surprise, I played Molar Maul, a ZX Spectrum game that avoided those terrible trends and just tried to make a game you’d want to replay because of its enjoyable action.

Molar Maul is actually structured in a fairly similar manner to arcade games of the time, this 1983 game about surviving as long as you can. Dentorium Kamikazium, or DK for short, are a type of bacteria that ride into the mouth aboard sweets in the world of Molar Maul, and in order to fight this surprisingly visible menace, a special toothpaste called Imagico was developed that contains the chemical DKX 11 that can both repair damaged teeth and force the DK to stop attacking them. What this small bit of story basically amounts to is that Molar Maul is a game about trying to brush teeth as waves of bacteria appear in the mouth to wear them down. When the mouth opens at the start of a session every one of the 32 teeth has a small yellow layer of tooth decay over them that the DK attempt to worsen, the moving bacteria attaching to a tooth to start shifting its color. The different colors indicate how damaged the tooth is and how much scrubbing with Imagico will be required to make them clean and white, but if you don’t manage the teeth well and aren’t quick enough, a tooth can be worn down completely and left with a rather large cavity.

Surprisingly, Molar Maul is rather generous with how many teeth can be damaged without penalty. The player has three lives contextualized as three toothbrushes, and when four teeth have been worn down beyond all hope, a toothbrush is lost. This means in order to lose, 12 teeth total have to be destroyed by the DK. Losing a tooth is naturally a bad thing as it pushes you closer to a loss, but it also removes one of the many teeth you need to take care of, making management a tiny bit easier even though the DK are going to get more aggressive and numerous as the game goes on. Managing the teeth is actually part of the thrill though, the player needing to quickly adjust on the fly to the DK activity and make sure they aren’t letting too many teeth get heavily damaged. If your toothbrush has some Imagico on it you can intercept DK while they are breaking down a tooth and immediately wipe them away to prevent the damage, but your movement isn’t quick and precise enough to interrupt all of their attacks and sometimes taking advantage of the fact certain teeth aren’t under attack might be the time you need to polish them off so they can survive any future attacks. A great sense of hectic danger that is possible to mitigate and counter keeps Molar Maul constantly involved, especially since even if the DK on screen are rather tame and still deciding on their targets you can use the time to clean other teeth as a preparatory action.

Decay Level is displayed at the top of the screen and mostly provides a metric for how poorly the mouth is doing, but the more important metric is likely the Bacteria Level number shown in the bottom left. Decay Level is almost like a score but counts up to indicate how dire the situation is while Bacteria Level actually refers to how deep you are into the game. Sweets will periodically enter the mouth to introduce new waves of DK, but as you start using your Imagico toothpaste to fight them, you’ll eventually completely empty the tube. Once a tube is empty, the Bacteria Level is considered defeated and you move onto the next one. Trying to get to higher Bacteria Levels by attempting different tactics for tooth decay management ends up being the interesting goal to shoot for, play not evolving drastically as you get deeper in but the difficulty increase still ensuring there’s a rise in tension as things become harder to effectively manage.

Admittedly, Molar Maul doesn’t have the cleanest controls. Controlling the toothbrush inside the large open mouth that nearly fills the screen isn’t as fluid or intuitive as one might expect, and getting to grips with its nature is the first key to fighting back the DK. The bristle positioning on the brushes is incredibly important, the player only able to scrub a tooth if the bristles are placed right up against them. This may sound obvious, but every time you move the brush, the bristles will flip their position. If you move up the bristles point up, and down will make them instantly point down, but when it comes to cleaning teeth the sometimes small adjustments to the left or right prove more troublesome. The top and bottom rows of teeth both have a flat cluster of four in the middle where making the small adjustments to reach the teeth can lead to flipping left and right rather than reaching the two sandwiched between the border teeth. The brush handle can also get stuck against teeth on a higher elevation and oddly enough the uvula in the center of the mouth is solid, movement around the mouth thus more challenging than simply moving to the teeth in danger. However, this does complement the difficulty well, the DK seemingly programmed with these limits in mind. This is why sometimes the player will need to weigh up if fighting a DK as it attacks a tooth is worth it and only the most powerful DK can wear down a tooth so quickly that they require instant attention.

Finagling the brush around the mouth is easy to understand after a bit if not always as clean to control as it could have been, but it does add a limit to your ability without making it feel like you’re always fighting the controls. Even the part where it is most strict in exact positioning doesn’t hurt the gameplay. A tube of Imagico toothpaste will be dropped into the mouth whenever the current amount on your brush runs out, the player needing to move the brush to the exact spot necessary for the paste to squeeze out onto it. You can’t be a little too low or a little too much to the left for it to work, and while the microadjustments could have been handled better, the little hitch in the action required to position the toothbrush just so isn’t so disruptive that it will really slow you down once you understand the movement style at play.

THE VERDICT: While the movement in Molar Maul does require a bit to grow accustomed to, fighting back against active tooth decay proves to be a remarkably enjoyable arcade-like experience. 32 teeth sound like a lot to manage but you are given a good bit of leeway in the losses you can weather and the DK bacteria are balanced around your own movement limitations. Tactical play ends up being the best way to get deeper into the game as you learn when it might be best to actively counter a DK attack or work on other teeth so they’ll be safe from future assaults. Simple but addictive despite the rigid toothbrush movement, Molar Maul is a good bit of quick fun even if you find your brush handle bumping teeth fairly often.

And so, I give Molar Maul for the ZX Spectrum…

A GOOD rating, and one I’m happy to give it for not trying to extend its length with unfair tactics. Molar Maul would certainly be a better game if the brush could be more easily moved in a direction without adjusting the bristle position, but players can acclimate to this movement style after they understand it from early experimentation and once the action begins they’ll find their tooth cleaning tool is up to the job. Including the full 32 teeth was a bold but intelligent choice not only because it ensures the player can always stay busy even when the DK are just entering the mouth and haven’t picked a tooth yet but because it also likely lead to the forgiving idea of letting the player lose 12 teeth before play ends. This allowance doesn’t make the game too easy by any means but it makes the management of such a play field possible and the slight hindrance of your movement isn’t going to be felt as much when the bar for absolute failure is at a fair level. Some other small adjustments would likely have required it to be a for a different system entirely, the fact that tooth color indicates the decay level on them can sometimes rub up against issues with the ZX Spectrum’s color bleeding so it can be hard to tell how much damage a tooth has when a DK is rubbing up against it and overwhelming it with its own color. Save for the few particularly hostile DK types you’ll usually have a good idea of how much peril an attacked tooth is in. Perhaps a better scoring system rather than the decay level would also make this more appealing to high score chasers, but Molar Maul’s level system also gives a very concrete indicator of progression to shoot for despite the inevitable loss this game’s protection-oriented play style ends with.

Molar Maul isn’t a case of me bumping up a game’s rating just because it stands out amongst its contemporaries on the console either. I have played decent games for the ZX Spectrum like Jetpac which also chose to focus more on extending its play through enjoyable persistent action rather than trial and error. Molar Maul hit on a solid premise and knew how to build its action around things like the movement style and number of targets your opposition can attack. The game’s designer, John Gibson, thankfully chose to look to the arcade for inspiration instead of other microcomputer games, because while arcade games were sometimes just as guilty as unfair difficulty, their play styles tended to focus on hooking players with compelling gameplay instead of barring them from progress. Surprisingly this game found its way to Steam for 2 dollars as well with a little more polish, so the story of Molar Maul didn’t quite end as a nice little glimmer of goodness on the ZX Spectrum. I’m sure there are many more games for the British microcomputers to enjoy that I’ll find as time goes on, but finally having one of clear quality when divorced of any nostalgic attachment others may have for it gives me more hope this will be a common occurrence going forward.