Dr. Lunatic Supreme With Steam

I had been meaning to write about this game months ago, but forgot about it up until now. The unexpected rerelease of Dr. Lunatic: Supreme with Cheese on Steam is a new chance to introduce this super classic to a new generation, and it gives me the perfect opportunity to get back around to a long overdue review!
Dr. Lunatic is the best game no one's ever heard of. Everyone comes around to learn of a forgotten NES gem eventually, but when it comes to PC games, it's not uncommon for some really great ones to be stuck in the darkness for decades without much of a chance of resurfacing.
Originally released in 2003, Supreme with Cheese is the culmination of 10 years of evolution of a homegrown formula. It really got its start from a DOS game called SPISPOPD, but most of us have first learned about the series through the later games being included on shareware CDs - Spooky Castle, Kid Mystic, and of course, the original Dr. Lunatic without the pizza. The result is a game with a rock solid core, a ton of polish, and an unbelievable amount of flexibility that would rival Doom.
You assume the role of Bouapha, a bald-headed pumpkin smasher that must pick up hammers to fight bad guys and retrieve zombie brains to foil the plans of Dr. Lunatic and his zombie army. Some may be quick to compare its top-down combat to Gauntlet, but there's so much in even just the essential gameplay mechanics that this should really be regarded as its own thing. Sure, you've got the familiar keys, various enemy generators, and what not, but this game places a lot of emphasis on exploration. A wide variety of secrets are scattered about, from optional candles to collect, secret levels hidden within levels, four keychains within each world, and sometimes even some extra quests to unveil even more secrets!
That's something I should explain further, worlds... all of the game's levels are neatly organized into different worlds. The original Dr. Lunatic had just five, as far as I can tell, but many, many more were soon to follow. These were all community-contributed, originally submitted to the Hamumu website. Some of the earliest ones were enhanced from their Expando/Fun Pak counterparts to take advantage of the new features of Supreme, and more brand new worlds were created specifically for it. All of these can be found in the SpisMall, the in-game store (purely using a fictitious in-game currency, no microtransactions!) Supposedly, many of the following Supreme worlds submitted to the site have since been included in this release as well. I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure you can take his word for it.
The art style is straight out of the late 90's where an affordable graphics workstation was some 200MHz beige box running Windows 95 or NT 4.0. It punctuates the very "dumb" style this and many other Hamumu games sold themselves on. Those aren't my words; "dumb" is a philosophy that was intended to contrast the often gratuitous violence which many of the top games from the US often leaned towards. Dr. Lunatic rolls all the cheese you could possibly think of into a gigantic meatball. Goofy pre-rendered 3D sprites, mouth-based sound engineering, and all the fun of Halloween-type B-movies... how can you not love it?!
You've really gotta check out the in-game world editor as well; it has to be bought in the shop, but this is an easy task, as it only takes 150 coins. There's so much you can do with point and click editing. The last time I used the editor was in 2006, so it's hard for me to recall everything, but you can mix together many different tile sets and load your own, create triggers for an immense variety of events, tweak any of the items to your liking, and basically go nuts with ideas. The only thing I think would be nice to have is a scripting engine; it would probably be more efficient for me, given I know some programming in C and 8086 assembly. But hey, the source code is readily available now. Someone's bound to add it at some point.
It's crazy to think just how forward-thinking Supreme with Cheese was in a number of ways. One thing I can point out is the art gallery within the SpisMall, where a new picture is added when you fulfill a certain condition. While this was far from the first game to implement inconsequential goals, this was still a full two years before achievements became cool. The scoring system is also a bit deeper than you would expect, as it pushes for very efficient playthroughs of levels to achieve the highest scores. You'll easily notice how that is when you play the game.
The added official Linux support is a major deal, as it always is. So far, I've found a minor bug in my particular setup (using PipeWire as a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio) where some sounds seem to get cut off prematurely, which is very noticeable when firing the AK-8087, but otherwise the game works exactly as it should here. (11/21/2023: This and a couple other bugs have been fixed in a more recent patch)
I sure don't remember a lot of things from when I was really little, but that time I first played Spooky Castle on an eGames CD at my aunt's house in... November 1999, I believe? It's one thing I can never forget. So, as a very old school fan, seeing the classic HUD from there being brought back for this new release is a very nice touch. Currently it seems to be missing the combo indicator, but I think that could be a quick and simple fix.
This game is something you've really gotta buy as soon as possible. It's so well-crafted and will carry you a long way. And who knows, maybe this new release will be the start of more exciting things to come for smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris.

I played this game as a young child and still think it holds up very well today. Everyone should experience this game and it's absolutely worth the ten dollars.

This game is some of my oldest and weird gaming memories.
I had a cd with a demo of it, that came with a tech magazine.
I forgot about this game most of the times, but remembered about it when thinking about really old memories, and found it one time, like 10y ago, by searching "old pc game, where you play as a bald dude, that throws red hammers", and then forgot the name again.
Me and my uncle, which played this game with me, where talking about it a couple of weeks ago, and to my surprise, i found it today on Steam.
This is just pure fun, and nostalgic to me.
Thank you for immortalizing this masterpiece on steam.

The gameplay is both fun and relaxing; it's sort of a cross between Gauntlet and Chips Challenge, though rarely becoming as difficult or stressful as either. The balance of simple combat and puzzles/exploration is addicting; if you're wondering why some people have 100+ hours, that's why. Well, that and the sound effects.
HAMMER UP
PANTS
Highly recommended.

This is back from the time when indie games were actual games and not university project assignments in Unity.

A massively souped up and enhanced version of the little-known shareware hammer-'em-up "SPISPOPD II: Dr. Lunatic", now available on Steam with full Steam Deck support and workshop support. Comes with a level editor for potentially unlimited replay value, and around 80 official worlds. It will probably take you ages to finish every level and get all the secret stuff.

By the way, did you know that the idea for this game's predecessor originally came from a DOOM community in-joke? The More You Know(tm.)

Still as addictive as the day it was released twenty years ago. And now that it's on Steam, with Workshop support for user-created levels and all, it's life-span just got a new lease.
Check out the Art Gallery as soon as you unlock it, that's a time capsule right there.