Battle Cheese is a military strategy game for PC-DOS developed by Brad Boggess and released in 1995. The game plays similar to Risk, with a map divided into numerous territories. Each player has an army of units occupying a set of starting territories, with the aim of building up and attacking opposing territories to ultimately seize control of the entire map. The catch in Battle Cheese is that these armies are comprised of humanoid "cheese mutants" and cheese-based weaponry, seeking to dominate Earth's continents in the wake of a nuclear disaster.
The game features a text crawl to explain how the world came to be in this state: the year is 2048. The world's supply of natural gas is nearly depleted, causing a scramble to find new sources of energy. The world's first fusion reactor is completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is able to power the entire United States. Other nations are unable to replicate this feat until a lone spy sneaks into the reactor, diagrams the system, and sells the information to Russia. Russia builds its own fusion reactor, but upon startup it explodes and covers the Earth in a radioactive cloud, killing all of humanity within days. Bizarrely, the intense heat of the explosion causes human DNA to merge with molecules from nearby sources of cheese, birthing a new breed of creatures who are half-cheese, half-human. These mutants band together into armies based on distinctions between their cheesy natures and begin fighting each other over an insatiable hunger to claim more land for their kind.
The game's full version (with four maps and support for up to two human players) is freely available to download/play online, on sites such as DOSGames.com and the Internet Archive.
Not to be confused with Battle Chess.
Tropes featured in this game include:
- After the End: The game takes place in the wake of a nuclear explosion that killed all of humanity.
- Aggressive Play Incentive: To maintain morale and support, an army needs to send its units to attack and capture enemy territories.
- Air-Vent Passageway: A spy infiltrates MIT's fusion reactor by traveling through "an ancient network of steam tunnels."
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: No explanation is given for why Russia's nuclear fusion reactor spectacularly fails on launch by exploding and irradiating the Earth's surface.
- Bland-Name Product: Nanosoft is named as "the only remaining commercial software company" and one of the funding sources that helps MIT build its reactor.
- Cartoon Bomb: Limburger Bombs look like this, with a yellow color instead of the standard black shell. They animate by bouncing around, and explode into a pile of smoking shrapnel when their side wins a battle.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The icon for each territory is one of four colors depending on which army currently controls it: blue for Bleu, orange for Cheddar, green for Cream, and white for Swiss.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: A spy sneaks into MIT's fusion reactor disguised as a student, but forgot his writing utensils at home. So he uses his fingernail to carve a schematic into a slice of cheese from a sandwich. This piece of cheese becomes one source of the mutants birthed by the nuclear explosion.
- Easy Logistics: Players only really need to worry about units and the money it costs to purchase them. New units can be deployed instantly to any area controlled by the player's army, even if it's surrounded by enemy territories. Downplayed in that existing units in an area can only move to one adjacent area per turn, so it takes time to move starting units to the front line from areas that don't need them.
- Enemy Scan: Each human player can only see info about the units in their own areas, and has to deploy Recon Parmesan to find out what's in enemy territories. Unfortunately this is impractical because (a) a spy can be caught and thus provide no intel; (b) it takes multiple successful spies to get full data on a territory; (c) this intel becomes outdated when the target updates units; and (d) the computer doesn't need to spy on human players in the first place.
- Evil Laugh: Elite Troops and Gouda Guns have a particularly wicked laugh among their soundbites from when their side wins a battle.
- Excuse Plot: It's not important to the gameplay to know that radioactive fallout is responsible for armies of cheese creatures battling over control of the Earth's landmasses, but it certainly fleshes out the oddball aesthetic.
- Fantastic Racism: The mutants band together based on their cheesy characteristics such as color, texture, and flavor, while denouncing those unlike themselves as inferior.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: The Asia map shows the crater caused by Russia's failed fusion reactor, with the main territory called Greater Crater and surrounding territories named North/East/South/West Crater.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: At the start of each game, the human player chooses the intelligence rating of all computer players, which determines how well they focus on targeting threats. The scale goes: Clueless, Stupid, Dumb, Average, Smart, Genius.
- I'm Melting!: Regular Troops melt into a puddle of runny cheese when their side loses a battle. Gouda Guns fall apart in a way that looks halfway between melting and crumbling.
- Medium Blending: Most of the game's art is 2D, but the main menu screen is a static render of a 3D-modeled environment showing several cheese troops at a fortification, while the victory screen is a short animation of a similar environment where a troop lobs a bomb at two other troops.
- Morale Mechanic: Individual territories have a morale rating represented by a colored bar which indicates how well its units can fight. Similarly, each player's army has an overall "support" rating indicated by a smiley face that shows how much money they gain at the start of their phase, based on how well they've been winning battles and capturing territories.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The computer never uses Recon Parmesan to spy on other territories, freeing up those turns for it to mobilize its armies and attack.
- Next Sunday A.D.: The backstory places the game in the year 2048. Even compared to its original release date of 1995, there isn't much societal advancement shown, other than national superpowers accomplishing nuclear fusion for the first time due to natural gas running dry.
- Opening Scroll: From the main menu, the player can view a text crawl with interspersed illustrations that defines the game's setting.
- Post-Peak Oil: Gasoline prices top $58.99 a gallon before the world figures out nuclear fusion. A few months after that, humanity blows itself up and leaves the world to the cheese mutants.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Downplayed. When two armies battle, their units play their winning/losing animations based on which side has fewer casualties. A defending territory can "win" by killing more attackers, even if the defenders are wiped out and their territory gets captured.
- Shareware: The game was originally released as such, offering two maps and up to one human player. The registered version has four maps and allows up to two human players.
- Take Over the World: Each player's objective is to wipe out the other players' armies and thus control all of the territories on the map.
- Tank Goodness: The most powerful and expensive units are Gouda Guns, which are tanks that roll on two large wheels and have a pair of front-facing cannons.
- Team Switzerland: Defied. One of the four cheese armies used in each game is Swiss, and they are no more peaceful or neutral than the others.
- Unstable Equilibrium: Winning battles and capturing territories earns players greater morale and support, which gives them more of the resources they need to continue performing well. Ironically, once two players are eliminated, this can turn the remaining one-on-one situation into a stalemate; the large number of territories force players to spread their armies thin, creating holes where the other side can recapture and rebuild support, chasing each other's main forces around the map.
- World of Pun: Pretty much every name in the game is a pun of some kind, whether about cheese, food in general, or otherwise. Computer-controlled players have names such as "Chet R. Cheese" and "Julius Cheeser". Territory names are puns, rhymes, or other wordplays, such as "Tuba" for Cuba or "Thigh Land" for Thailand.
