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Excuse me? Chex Quest? What the hell is that? Chex Quest was a rather unique DOOM license released by
General Mills on a CD stuffed free into boxes of Chex Cereals.
Chex Quest is by far the strangest of the DOOM Licenses. It did not bring any of the new technologies that
Raven put into Heretic or
Hexen, nor that Rogue Entertainment put into Strife. What it did do was make a DOOM license that children could play.
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The plot was as simple as that of DOOM: The hero, a piece of Chex Cereal with arms and legs, volunteers to be sent off to the
Bazoik Nutritional Development Center, which is infested with soggy Flemoids; beasts who destroy all nutritious breakfast foods. Armed with weapons that bloodlessly send
these beings back to their home world, our hero scours the base, disposing the Flemoids and making breakfast safe for children all over the world.
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The Weapons of DOOM were interestingly replicated in Chex Quest:
Num Weapon Doom Version
1 BootSpoon Fist
1 Robo-Spoon Chainsaw
2 Mini-Zorcher Pistol (3rd picture)
3 Large Zorcher Shotgun
4 Rapid Zorcher Chain Gun (4th picture)
5 Propulser Rocket Launcher
6 Phasing Zorcher Plasma Rifle (5th picture)
7 Laz Device BFG 9000
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The idiosyncrasies of DOOM's weapons were also carried over - reloading the Large Zorcher/Shotgun, the rotating barrel of the
Rapid Zorcher/Chain Gun, the Propulser/Rocket Launcher being dangerous at close range and the Phasing Zorcher/Plasma Gun missiles obscuring your vision.
Digging through the CHEX.WAD file reveals why - Chex Quest is little more than a DOOM Total Conversion. Most of the sounds,
graphics and music was replaced. The sprites for most monsters were replced with new images, while
others were replaced with blank images. Not all of the original DOOM artwork was excised, though: the bullet-riddled "The End" and
the "Dead Bunny" picture from the end of DOOM are still there, but never used.
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Was Chex Quest a good game? Well, it wasn't bad. In fact, it was better than most of the games based on the Wolfenstein 3D engine.
I don't remember if I ever finished Chex Quest. It didn't live on my hard drive for very long. Hell, I don't even know
where the CD-ROM for it is. I will say that it is the only DOOMish game that my wife ever played.
26 March 2001. I would like to thank DNSPagan who went to all the trouble of making a copy of Chex Quest for me so I could get these
screenshots. Updated the information on the page and corrected an embarrassingly high number of typo's and grammer errors. Removed dead links
for Heretic and Hexen. :(
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