Chex Quest: Doom Meets Cereal

We're all familiar with the toy-in-the-cereal-box promotions that have occurred since the dawn of time.  Usually cereal companies will stick a cheap plastic toy inside a limited amount of cereal boxes to drive sales, mainly due to children nagging their parents to death until they have that toy in their hands.  Back in 1996 a similar promotion was run in order to get kids excited about Chex cereal, only instead of offering a toy as part of the promotion, they offered a PC game (I still find it awesome to this day, and yes I was one of the nagging kids who had to have this game).

The game was called Chex Quest,and it was a first-person shooter designed to run on MS-DOS.
At first glance, something seems very familiar about Chex Quest:


Now where have we seen this before?  Ah yes, of course!



No your eyes do not deceive you, Chex Quest is actually a kid-friendly mod of Ultimate Doom.  The levels of this game are the first five levels of Ultimate Doom, with multiple texture changes. Instead of fighting demons from hell, you encounter "Flemoids," which are slimy creatures who threaten to devour every last bit of Chex (this includes the protagonist, the Chex Warrior, who is actually a living piece of Chex).

In an effort to avoid a M rating, Ultimate Doom's weapons are replaced with "Zorchers," which teleport the Flemoids back to their home planet instead of gunning them down.  To avoid gore in the game, the Chex Warrior's face gets covered with slime as he takes damage, as opposed to the Doom Guy's face becoming more bloody and disfigured as he approaches his death.



Another cool thing about Chex Quest is that by using certain command line arguments when launching the game, you can actually load up various levels of Ultimate Doom (sadly with Chex Quest textures though).  Unfortunately the sprites for the original demons have been removed, but said demons still exist in these levels as invisible menaces which can still shoot at you.

Chex Quest is an awesome game that I spent many hours with as a kid, and to this day I still fire it up every once in a while to play through a couple levels (thank you DOSBox!).  Did you guys ever get a chance to play this game?  Were you amused that it was a mod of Ultimate Doom, or did it infuriate you that they took an awesome game and gave it the kiddie treatment?
Chex Quest: Doom Meets Cereal Chex Quest: Doom Meets Cereal Reviewed by Rob on 7:18 PM Rating: 5

2 comments:

  1. Now I remember why I named my zapper I made (battery, switch, and transformer) "The Zorcher"

    I never actually played this but I remember a friend playing it..and being as the gun zapped enemies and I thought the name sounded kind of cool, my zapper was then named...until by brother (too young to know better) cut up the wires...ugh!

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    Replies
    1. Glad to hear you've rediscovered the origin of your zapper's name! Too bad your bro destroyed the Zorcher, but it's never too late to make a new one!

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