Check out out Top 47,585 Games of All Time episode discussing Dr. Lunatic Supreme with Cheese!
Supreme With Cheese is more or less the ultimate culmination of a series that spawned from a Usenet joke about Doom back in 1993. It’s basically a love letter to the small but dedicated fanbase of the previous version, Dr. Lunatic, and comes with every level, official or fan-made, made for it. That comes to about over a thousand levels, spread across over eighty ‘worlds’. While the quality between individual sets of levels can vary sharply, it still makes for a truly massive amount of content. How much of that you’ll see, however, depends on how much you enjoy its general style of play.
You control Bouapha, an unassuming bald man out to collect the brains stolen by the eponymous doctor to create a zombie army. Most levels have you wandering around, collecting enough brains to open the exit before the various monsters kill you. Bouapha starts every level defenseless, and if you’re lucky, you’ll quickly find hammers and pairs of pants to increase your firepower. Some levels make you search far and wide for even a single hammer, or even force you to make do with more creative means to defend yourself, if that. Still, there’s plenty of times when the game mixes things up – it might task you with escorting an innocent bunny to the exit, driving through an obstacle course, or answering trivia questions on pain of instant death.
You’ll never know just what you’re going to find when you enter a new level. It could be nothing more than a single screen with a few enemies to kill, it could be a sprawling maze, or it could be something far more puzzle oriented. The larger levels can often be the most frustrating – mess up anywhere, and there are no checkpoints. One of the game’s larger problems is that with so much of the content being fan-made, the quality can vary sharply. Some worlds can be just as good as the game’s official levels, with custom art and interesting uses of the game’s mechanics. Others are obviously made by young children, featuring wide open rooms full of randomly placed enemies. The only way to know for sure what you might be getting into is if you recognize a level author’s name from a previous work.
Clearing levels will earn you coins, which can be spent in the game’s SPISMall, where a variety of content can be found. The majority of things for sale are extra worlds, once you clear out the five you’re given to start with. You’ll also find things to help you find collectibles, simple minigames, an art gallery for various official and unofficial fanart, and a zoo containing developer commentary for every enemy in the game, amongst others. Trying to buy everything in the shop will probably only take somewhat less time than trying to clear every world, unless you happen to memorize every question to the quiz minigame.
The game recently got a rerelease on Steam, keeping things mostly authentic, but adding several Steam-based additions. It also makes the game much easier to run, so it’s worth the $10 standard sale price. If you’re coming in fresh, it may be somewhat of a harder sell than somebody with a lot of nostalgia for it. It’s a game with a lot of heart and an abundance of love, however, and it deserves appreciation for that alone.
