Bathroom Thoughts EP4: Revenge of the Cheese
Argh, I was a day late wasn't I?
Hello again Tumblr! It is I, Boxman, Biggeth 141. Back from my week off, I shall bestow yet another bathroom thought. What's on the docket this time? Cheese.
takin me dump smells like swiss innit
So I'm sitting there, thinking as I do, cleaning out the basement, when I have a random thought: Cheese. Cheese, again. Why does it always come back to cheese?
sometimes i dream about cheese
Now, this thought isn't some odd motif that so happens to commence upon seating with the average toilet, no; This thought derives from recent memory wherein I was playing some games with the lads and we came across a peculiar game.
Y'all know Roblox, right? Live service kid-friendly framework for making games n' all that? It's got a pretty odd culture surrounding it, especially due to its demographic, though I tend to visit it often to see what interesting games have been made using the platform. A lot of the games are weird, such as the illustrious "SHREK: The Force Awakens" (yes, it was this game that I borrowed the namesake from for Bathroom Thoughts EP1, not the Star Wars film). But among those weird games, a good lad of mine found something that a friend of his was playing.
A horror game about a cheese corridor where you escape a giant mouse. Everything was cheese. The collectables, a la Slender, were cheese. The walls, were cheese. To start the game? You had to click on a cheese-wheel 30 times, each time emitting a sound effect of someone muttering "Cheeeese."
My friend very quickly became tired of this game and wanted to leave, but just as we were heading out, we began finding these actually rather compelling liminal spaces hidden behind keys scattered across the map. Like some, Backrooms + Yume-Nikki kinda stuff going on with lamps everywhere and empty rooms.
The game ended with a road where you just kinda walked down and the mouse would jumpscare you. Weirdly enough, I was so disillusioned by how odd the game was, that my guard was down and it actually startled me a bit. Despite that, I came out of it with a curious thought: "why does everything become cheese eventually?"
This is far from a first. Whenever there's a framework, there should be a timer to see how quickly a game is modified to incorporate cheese to some extent. Among these games, I find it odd that in spite of having its very own bread mod, that Cookie Clicker has yet to have a cheese mod. But you know what does have a cheese mod? Call of Duty Zombies. Huh?
(screenshotted from CustomZombies)
This is Cheese Cube Unlimited. It's a sequel to a cheese themed one-room map called Cheese Cube, now designed around a cylindrical rising corridor. Notorious for being one of the most difficult custom zombies maps in Call of Duty: World at War, it combines elements from the Black Ops games that would long succeed WaW, with cheese, cheese, and more cheese. It had everything, greasy oil slowly rising for some reason that would just kill you upon touching it, cheese-based parkour, and cheesy zombies coming at you as you fire at them with cheese-upgraded weapons and cheesy perks.
Yeah, that's a lot of cheese. There's more, though:
The next (official) generation of Call of Duty modding came in the form of Black Ops 3 integrating Steam workshop and SDK support. Naturally, what succeeded would be plenty of zombie maps, and among many of these were the Cheese Cube successors. Remakes, ports, sequels, even a potato-themed spinoff.
What the HELL is with all this cheese? Don't gimme wrong, cheese is awesome, but I swear I've never seen this phenomenon anywhere else but the video game modding/development scene.
How about a Garry's Mod addon that adds a cheese NPC that charges at you? Well that exists too. Not only do you (theoretically) click on cheese, but you inhabit the cheese, team with the cheese, attack the cheese... and the cheese? The cheese is ultimately the horrific creature that races at you through the night.
So then I wake up out of my daydream and finish my toilet-business when I come to the realisation that everything will always come back to cheese. It's like Godwin's law, except instead of discussions and a particularly unsavoury group of individuals, its the arts (normally digital) and cheese.
I yearn for the coming of an "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" type film but with CHEEESE.
