Here it is, already a week since Halloween, and I’m only now getting around to this entry. We had a good turnout this year, but we had way more than enough candy. Two years ago we had a more modest amount of excess.
I enjoy decorating the front porch for Halloween. Some webbing, simple lighting, a fog machine, and creaky old radio shows make a nice effect. One kid, about ten, who came to house said he remembered coming here “when he was little”, and he always liked the way the house looks. Eric took Bismo’s son out again to make the rounds, and he wore the same getup as last year, but with a new mask.
Eric was goofing around with the digital camera and came up with a fun little video. He designed the pumpkin faces and I carved them. The old time radio program “The Whistler” is playing. Trivia note: Gerald Mohr, who says “likes to do it the hard way” was the voice of Reed Richards in the 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon. I posted one at this link, and you can also hear Mohr’s voice here. You’ll even find a picture of him on the blog. How did so much of Gerald Mohr get on DogRat.com?
Chex Quest 3 is available for download! In 1996 Eric was a wee lad of four years. Back then I was doing a lot of the grocery shopping (or, in deference to SamJay, food shopping), and one day I saw that Chex cereals had a promotion with a computer game on CD-ROM. It was called Chex Quest. The discs were manufactured by AOL in return for Chex including the then-ubiquitous offer to join AOL. Although I had no interest in America Online, I couldn’t pass up the free game.
My computer was an 83 MHz Pentium with 8 MB of memory and a 300 MB disk, that I’d upgraded from a 40 MHz 386 with 4 MB and a 170 MB disk. The upgrade made it possible to run Windows 95 no slower than I’d been running Windows 3.1. Internet access was a 33.6 Kbps modem dialing into a local service provider, and at that speed it took about an hour to download Chex Quest 2.
After installing Chex Quest, I recognized it immediately as being a DOS program based on the DOOM game engine. I watched the introductory video, with the background story for the game. I’ll let Eric explain the premise…
In a far-flung galaxy of breakfast cereal marketing, a Galactic Federation of anthropomorphic Chex squares is menaced by an invasion of the Flemoids, green snot-creatures likely created in reference to the “flem” that you sometimes taste in the back of your throat. The stalwart Chex Warrior sets out to end this threat, armed with a veritable arsenal of Zorch weaponry. Your journey goes from a base on the planet Bazoik, to the streets of Chex City, and finally on a world-tour of the cereal planet to exterminate the mucus beings once and for all. As the original game was eager to point out, the “Zorchers” aren’t supposed to kill the slime-beings, they merely “return” them back to their homeworld through a dimensional portal. This was an interesting way for developer Digital Cafe to create a kid-friendly game out of the unavoidably visceral Doom engine. However, it didn’t change the fact that the Zorchers are functionally exactly the same as their Doom counterparts: the “large Zorcher” works the same as the shotgun (and even has a similar reloading animation); and the LAZ is undeniably close to the infamous BFG. Despite playing almost identically to Doom, the difficulty was drastically toned down to accommodate a less experienced audience (which worked for me, as a kid!).
Thanks, Eric. We call 1997 The Year of the Flemoids. And indeed, the game had the intended effect of improving sales, because Rice Chex became Eric’s favorite cereal.
Eric was still too little to manage the game himself, so he’d sit in my lap while I went through the levels, zapping Flemoids. I’d feel dizzy after playing for a while, but adjusting the screen size helped, and when it didn’t I’d have to take a break. And I’m once again feeling the same effect, now that there’s a new edition of Chex Quest. Here’s more from Eric.
Not even two months ago, Chex Quest 3, a new installment in the Chex Quest “saga”, was released for free download as a collaboration between original creator and artist Charles Jacobi and the surprisingly large and active Chex Quest fan community. It still runs on the Doom engine; but online multiplayer support has been added, the difficulty has been greatly increased, and Jacobi has drawn and programmed five or so new Flemoid species to combat. Pushing the fifteen-year-old constraints of the Doom engine very close to their limits, environments are extremely detailed and elaborate, and all of the newly designed stages take place both inside and outside. In this excerpt from the game’s readme file, Jacobi elaborates on the project:
Years later Digital Cafe had ceased to exist and I had moved on to the game industry proper. Even though I have been lucky enough to have been part of teams creating AAA commercial games, I also take pride in having worked on Chex Quest. Many a fellow game artist has called me “old school”, knowing I had gotten my start developing a Doom mod. I rarely went back and looked at Chex Quest though, as I was always preoccupied with staying on the cutting edge of game art. That means high-end 3D and certainly not things like 256-color textures and sprite animations. Then around six years ago I got my first email from Mark Quinn, who the Doom modding community knows as Boingo the Clown. He was telling me about his project called the Ultimate Chex Quest. He described an ambitious effort to update our old Doom game to a more modern version of Doom and fill out the remaining 17 or so missing maps with new content. He was extremely polite in asking if I would contribute some new artwork. It was a bit intriguing, but I had a lot going on at the time and declined. However I was quite suprised [sic] when I did play his mod. The levels had all been improved yet retained the core experience we had designed. Playing Boingo’s mod had sparked my interest in Chex Quest more than anything had in a long time. In the years following I got other emails from fans with similiar [sic] requests. In late 2007 I found myself with some spare time and started some sketches that would turn out to be the all-new flemoid, the Super Cycloptis. After creating that and seeing how it was received by the fans, I got motivated to make more stuff. Before long I had installed Doombuilder and was making maps.
Here are some screenshots that Eric has selected from Chex Quest 3.
I realize that I’ve lost some blogging energy and haven’t posted much lately, and what there is has perhaps very little interest to most. I’m working on some things that will hopefully be more entertaining to you. But there are gutters to clean — again — and leaves to rake, and guests are coming over today then we’re all going out to dinner.
The complete 48 Hours|Mystery program, “Did the Doctor Kill the Doctor?” is now available online. In an unexpected addendum to the story, I’ve been informed by my best friend, D.F. Rogers, that 48 Hours is now working on another show, about a totally unrelated murder, and last week CBS interviewed somebody with knowledge of the case. Dennis’ father.
A funny coincidence came up when talking to CBS News about the 48 Hours|Mystery installment that just aired. I learned that the daughter of one of my father’s cousins is married to the nephew of CBS News veteran Morley Safer. This is her in September with Ron Howard, before he shaved for his video endorsing Barack Obama.
