The Best Quest

I'd like to start off my blog this week a day late and by saying that I finally found a piece to my Sega Genesis' AC-in port. I had ended up jerry-rigging the missing piece with a bent push-pin, but maybe I'll desolder everything again to have the intended part back in place... Meh...

When I was five or six, I got literally the best thing I've ever gotten out of a cereal box before. (The cereal in Cinnamon Life cereal box is usually the second best thing.) I happily tore into the box to find this:

A whopping 50 hours of AOL!

 A free video game. Now, this was back in 1996, so it was before any random company could afford to get a game that was a shameless rip-off of another game. (Now, I'm pretty sure that the entire online cereal industry thrives off it.) The game was none other than, Chex Quest!

For those of you who never had a chance to play this wonderful game, let me tell you: it's a kiddie version of Doom with more references to nutrition and breakfast than space marines and demonology. However, this wasn't some cobbled-together rip off of Doom. That would imply that the company, Digital Cafe, had tried to imitate Doom's engine. ID Software actually handed them the tools to make it. Or rather, they licensed the Doom engine to them. (This was back before it was freeware.)

The game itself is pretty much like a G-rated Doom. The demons are now a race of gooey, snot-like aliens called "Flemoids".

Seen here ominously advancing...

The kick-ass space marine is now a kick-ass Chex marine (or as best as I could figure.) And most of the violence has been "zorched" away with the zorcher. A magical teleporting weapon that would harmlessly transport the Flemoid back to its home world. (Or so the nice cereal scientist guy would have us believe.)

"The screaming is a side-effect of the Zorcher, I assure that the Flemoid feels no pain at all..."

The thing that never made sense about all of this was that your melee weapon was a spoon...

Spoons: Not just for gouging anymore!

The cynic in me loves the fact that literally within minutes of explaining that only Zorchers could work against the Flemoids, the game breaks its own continuity and establishes that a normal spoon has the power to banish aliens back to their own world. While the cynic sneers at that, the nerd in me just giggles in excitement to what replaces the chainsaw weapon:

My friends, I introduce, the Boost-Spork. Possibly the best weapon to ever grace a computer screen. Never go head to head with a man who attaches a high-power motor to a spork.

The game is pretty straightforward. Scientists are trapped in a laboratory that happens to be where the aliens attack. Only one man (cereal) has the testicular fortitude (nutritional fortitude) to go in and kick some ass (zorch some ass).

This game is, was, and might forever be my favorite FPS.

The game was about five levels long, though in actuality, almost all of Doom was included in the files. Apparently, by using some cheat codes, you can access some of the Doom levels, but since the creators didn't use all of the sprites, many enemies were left blank. This is an aesthetic improvement from most of the enemies in Doom, but turns what was already a nightmarish game into full-on nightmare fuel, since many of the stronger enemies are completely invisible.

Even more fun can be had by swapping out the WAD files from the actual Doom, allowing you to play through Chex Quest as though it were other Doom levels, or even more fun, play through some Doom levels as though they were Chex Quest.

The game had something of a sequel-hook to get you involved with those 50 free hours of AOL: a sequel, Chex Quest 2 could be downloaded at a website that you could get the address to if you finished the game. Since this was right around the time most kids were actually getting dial-up in the home (if they were lucky) it was hard for me at the time to have to sit out the sequel for almost a full decade. Finally, after I reached an age where I could appreciate nostalgia, I started to look for the sequel only to find myself even more pleasantly surprised:

Finish the Fight!

 Charles Jacobi and Scott Holman, two people who worked on the original two games, decided to finish the originally planned trilogy on their own, much to my delight. In 2008, more than 10 years after the game came free in a breakfast cereal, the saga finally ended... Or did it?

Yes. Yes it did.

Looking back on things, the only problem I have with the series is that the enemies grow only when fed nutritious substances. This is horrifying to a bunch of vitamin-enriched "crunchy even in milk" beings. But, the problem is that everybody grows on nutritious substances. Even the Chex-Man himself!
While it makes sense that the bad guys would have a reason to target a nutrition base on Bazoik (hell, who wouldn't?) it also means that the very kids who are playing the game are essentially committing mass murder in their breakfast bowls every morning. My goal every morning is more or less the same as the Flemoids. I show up unexpectedly on the poor citizens of Pantria (The Pantry planet, close cousin to Food-Cupboardia), ransack their nutrition lab (which was cleverly defended with a plastic shielding underneath their hard "cardboardium" force fields) and devour them by the spoonful. Or handful if I'm going more for a snack than a legit meal.

Also, the problem with the weapons needs to be addressed, and kind of already has been in the sequels. The intro says that they recalibrate their Zorchers to tap into their teleportation matrix. You basically teleport the Flemoids back to their home planet. Presumably so they can regroup and tell everyone about the delicious sources of food they'd found. The sequels follow the same vein as the Doom games. You saved the far-away world only to realize that you forgot to lock the front door to your own world! At the end of the third game, you defeat the Lord of Flemoids. And by defeat, I mean to say, you just sent him back home. The same place that he had no qualms of leaving to invade your sorry-ass planet. There's nothing to stop him from doing it again, only this time he knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

Also, what the hell are Zorchers?

"What the hell is in my hand?"

The Zorchers are already commonplace things if we take the intro movie at face value. They aren't created specifically to fight off the aliens, they're just recalibrated. There are only a few options. One is that they serve some other purpose than self-defense, which would just be silly. The picture above shows a quad-barreled zorcher for rapid zorching. They come in bigger and heftier sizes. According to Urban Dictionary, the only other non-military use for a zorcher would be, apparently, "to suck the fart out of someone's butt" which I personally find quite distasteful in all senses of the word.

The only other options are all very militarized in nature. Honestly, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that cereal people would happen to have some terrible enemies and would need to defend themselves while blowing up their enemies simultaneously. But there's honestly no way to apply any serious thought to that notion without being overcome by hilarity when you think of the terrible and devastating wars that the Chexonians presumably fought.

"My Crunchling forces will destroy your cities and drink the blood of your people! As part of a complete and balanced breakfast."

 Even stranger is the fact that, although this is a civilian base on Bazoik, constructed only to grow things like fruits and vegetables and study nutrition, there seems to be some really heavy artillery sitting around. Like, smear the room with whatever used to be standing in it kind of artillery. Suddenly, it also strikes me as odd that they'd go all the way to a deserted planet to study mundane things like nutrition. I think that whatever the Chexonians were doing on Bazoik, the nutrition lab was a cover-up for insane military testing. Stuff like testing bio-chemical agents on cute puppies and/or building teleporters into Hell.

Hell-Portals aren't going to build themselves!

Or maybe they were too distracted by the rampant nutrition on their home-planet and needed to get away from it all so they could finally study it without moral qualms of breeding Chex with Kix (which would taste fantastic by the way...)

In the end, the games are pretty solid to play through, if not a little dated. The original version had an interesting glitch where if you tried to play the game on the hardest difficulty, you'd be hard-pressed to beat it, since the last room has so many enemies spawned that it will invariably crash the game if you actually look at them. The new version runs off of the ZDoom engine which allows for free Y-axis movement, so aiming up and jumping are allowed. You can find the entire trilogy here.

May the... Chex... be with... Aw, screw it, there's no way you can make a phrase that doesn't sound horrible...