Smarties: Meltdown The Sweet Copy

Did you know that Smarties had a video game? Well if you're anything like me, you're probably wishing to forget that I just mentioned that. Well in the ripe ole year of 2006, a PlayStation 2 game entitled Smarties Meltdown was released, and I don't think it really needs to be said that the game was naturally not very good. Not just not good, it is often regarded as one of the worst video games of all time. It tries to advertise the chocolate candy Smarties, but fails miserably in doing so. Smarties are basically knock off M&M's but without the m's or the memorable characters that make those sweets so much sweeter. Sweeter than the wisdom teeth who sings country versions of classic show tunes, but secretly that tooth is a spy but for who we can't say. My name is Jonathan Maguire, and I recently bought the game for my son and lets just say he didn't like the game very much and he was so disturbed by it that he refuses to speak to me. Not that I mind anyway, I mean my son hates me already because of my career as a fast food agent, and the fact that I constantly disrupt his social gatherings to tell stories about how Ronald McDonald might be in love with Jack Frost given the uncomfortable noises that ole Frosty made after Ronald gave him a hug in front of the cynical elves. The elves have become fat and lazy as a result of the bacon ultimate cheese burger from Jack In The Box. Not only has the burger caused all of the elves to become very fat and lazy, it has caused them to forget all about how to make the toys much to the anger of old Mr C who has lost a considerable amount of weight suggesting that the North Pole might in the middle of a famine. Sorry about that. I'm still getting used to life after my son gave me back the game.

Smarties: Meltdown is about an evil sour chew named Dr Sour Sweet who has bigger plans than trees, and wants his sour themed candy Stroopers to become the dominant sweet on the market. "Destroy those smarties!" Dr Sour Sweet proclaimed evilly while slamming his fist down on a big red button which caused all of the Smarties at the Nestle factory in space to be sucked up by a vacuml, as according to this game smarties come from space. A rogue smartie named Big Blue the main character of the game manages to escape Dr Sour Sweet's trap, as he declares war against the sour chew. Big Blue must make his way through the Nestle factory saving all the smarties along the way before finally putting Dr Sour Sweet down for good. Where do I even begin to explain the problems with this game? First of all, the camera was non visitant, the controls were all over the place, and Big Blue kept proclaiming things in his obnoxious voice. Big Blue was voiced by Dave Benson Phillips who I guess didn't have a very pleasant time making the game or at least he certainly forgot all about it. At a birthday party where Spider-Man fell to the floor and fucking died LMAO, I managed to get the chance to speak Benson and I asked him what he thought about the game and whether he enjoyed recording his lines for it. "I'm sorry what are you talking about?" Replied Benson who was genuinely confused. He wasn't instrusive, but he messaged me every day while I was studying to become a fast food agent. He thought he was messaging the chicken madras mafia about how he still owed them money, but I didn't have the heart to tell him he was wrong oh so very wrong indeed. The game was basically a crappy Crash Bandicoot clone just with smarties, and I'll be honest this game didn't really make me crave smarties. Sorry Nestle, but if this was your attempt to make your product appeal to the gamers out there, I think you seriously missed the mark on quite a few areas.

It should be noted however that in early production, the game was going to be very different. I held an interview with a man named Werner Terner who totally exists and totally worked on the game in real life. In any case, Mr Werner explained to me that once upon a smartie, the game was going to be quite different. The game was going to be a lot more sinister and feature lots of training montages. In the actual game, Dr Sour Sweet just says, "adios," and waddles away to get grapes or something. Originally however, Dr Sour Sweet was going to die either by burning to death or drowning in a sour pool. In one ending, Dr Sweet would have cornered Big Blue inside a room containing a bunch of oxygen tanks. Big Blue would light a lighter as he said coldly, "it's time Dr Sour Sweet." Meanwhile, the sour doc just looked baffled as the entire room exploded but thankfully Big Blue was thrown out from the room by the explosion thus allowing him to walk again. Yes, I should mention that originally there were alternate endings that were considered for the game. You collect smarties, and you need a certain amount of them in each area of the game world in order to access all the others. However, originally you had a choice. You could collect all the smarties, but you also didn't have to. The ending you got depended on the amount of smarties you collected before facing off with Dr Sour Sweet who may I say wore a top hat and monocle so elegantly that it's almost suspicious, If you collected all of the smarties, you'd get the normal ending where Big Blue restores peace to the smarties. However, if you collected none of the smarties, Dr Sour Sweet would succeed in eradicating all of the smarties, and Big Blue had to go on the run as the devious General Parcel had declared the blue smartie a war criminal. Dr Sour Sweet took control of the government by killing the President who was a massive Sonic fanboy and also a beautiful expy of Georgie Boy. Big Blue tried to escape the country by going on the run to Chicago thinking that some smarties out there could help him out, but instead they turned on him and gave him over to The Man In The Trench Coat a character removed from the final cut of the game who picked Big Blue up into his hands as he said, "M&M's mm." He then shoved the sweet into his mouth, and Big Blue was no more as an all mighty crunch could be heard that would cause heartbreak to any mere mortal that heard it. Werner explained that in one of the alternate endings, Sour Sweet would perform a heel face turn and realize that he was insane all along and that we must preserve our historic landmarks that maybe smarties are indeed the flavour favour. Tell that to Pop.

In concept art, Big Blue was designed with two big googly eyes and a mouth, but these were removed from the final game in order to help differentiate him from his M&M counterparts. So in the actual game, Big Blue has no eyes or mouth yet he still speaks better than most humans do. A lot of characters got cut from the game including the aforementioned Man In The Trench Coat who was going to be revealed to be the man behind the man, and that the entire game was just a story made up by him to send his children to bed and that he was playing with the smarties because he didn't own any actual toys for them to play with. How pathetic. He wasted his money on indulging money into a Coco Pop addiction. A pink smartie named Little Pink was going to be in the game and would have served as Big Blue's love interest, but thankfully she got removed which meant that we thankfully did not find ourselves getting a shoe horned in romantic plot and I really hate those. Little Pink was really annoying anyway as she would give Big Blue missions where he had to protect during a hockey game so she could practice her ballet in the middle of a hockey stadium that had already been rented out by Dr Sour Sweet's hockey team. Grandmother Smartie who looks exactly the same as Big Blue just with big red glasses and a grey haired wig was another character cu from the game and she was going to be the hidden secondary antagonist having been hired by Dr Sour Sweet to help trap all of the smarties. it's worth noting that when Big Blue's smartie brethren saw that Grandmother Smartie had ratted them out, they didn't really seem all that concerned and just sounded mildly puzzled as they asked, "Grandmother Smartie?" When Grandmother Smartie reveals her deception to Big Blue in the game's penultimate mission, Big Blue immediately forgives her which causes her to turn into sand. This is when The Man In The Trench Coat reveals his true self to Big Blue, and he was none other than Major Toht who had managed to escape the Ark Of The Covernent incident under shady circumstances. These days, he resides in a house in Berlin where he frequently has to deal with his face melting all the time as a result of the ark's powers still being inside his ass. Toht's wife was really annoying as she kept making Toht stick his head inside the oven, and then made him eat spaghetti when all he really wanted was a tire as tires are the only thing that he can eat. Major Toht picked up the sandy sand, and laughed hysterically much to Big Blue's delight as he realized that maybe traitors don't deserve second chances. This is a horrible lesson to teach kids and smartie lovers, but whatever.

Werner admitted to me that had the game not been rushed into launch, he would have wanted Big Blue to be a much richer character with a darker personality a hidden sour side that he struggled with. The game was actually meant to more of a satire in early drafts of the way big sweet companies like Nestle are run, with Dr Sour Sweet being a characiture of big business CEO's. There was even going to be propaganda against Nestle in one of the game's menus which featured a SICK clip of a man working in an office and he is really tired so he decides to take a break and breaks his teeth into a KitKat only for us to see that it an orangutan's finger much to the man's delight and the horror of his boss who much like the smarties from earlier didn't really seem too terribly concerned as he mostly just sounded slightly bemused as he asked, "what's that?" It then showed an orangutan getting chased down the street by a man with a golden gun as a man in the background could be heard saying, "give the orangutan a break," again and again in an overly serious tone of voice. He was the same man who would tell viewers of the Rap Rat Video Board Game that Rap Rat was the boss, he and the rapping lord himself had recently fallen out after Rap Rat learned that the man had ties to the Krillitane who eat rats for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper. In order to make it up to his beloved Rap Rat, the man started appearing in commercials where he called out companies that used animals to make a deal. That's quite commendable, and I think I would respect it a tad bit more had it not been done for that bastard of a rat otherwise known as Rap Rat. Hmm. A sequel was actually planned out too while the game was in production because Nestle assumed that it was going to be a big success, as Nestle are quite smug like that. They always assume that things are going to go great for them, they thought at last they finally have a franchise on their metaphorical hands, but boy were they wrong.

The sequel was in early development, and was going to be a standalone sequel so it's unknown if Big Blue would have appeared. In a planned joint merger between the Nestle and the Wrigley Company, the game would have been called Smarties Vs Skittles: A Tale Of Two Candies. It featured a group of smarties going to war with a group of skittles inside a house in Eastbourne. There would have been an epic scene as the two candy armies approach each other for the first time as really cheesy 50's music plays in the background on a pipe organ. The game would have ended with the owner of the house Mr Eastbourne coming downstairs, and upon seeing the candy confectionery he picked them up and ate them up in one big bite. Like the toys in Toy Story, the smarties would freeze up whenever a human was present. Almost immediately, Mr Eastbourne spat out the sweet mixture as a jumble of reds, yellows, and blues got all over his workstation as he remarked, "smarties and skittles don't mix!" Instead of Dr Sour Sweet, the villain of the game was going to be King Smartie whom production really wanted Pierce Brosnan to voice the king, and the game was going to show that maybe smarties aren't as benevolent as they seemed in the original game. The game was planned to come with a smartie themed PlayStation 2 controller, and the king was going to be a very dark character who angers his subjects by adopting a human man named Derek Ratface who looked very ratty and he had a thing for people that sit on the statue of his idol George Washington. Ratface was obsessed with Washington, and had decorated his bunker in Soho to be all about Washington. Of course, as a result of the massive negative reaction to the first game, a sequel sadly never came to pass. Since Nestle owned the rights to the characters, it seems unlikely that a sequel will ever happen.

According to Werner, very early in the original game's production, Big Blue was going to rescue a blind man named Joe Chicken and would help him cross the great Atlantic, and despite making himself out to be the bravest smartie of them all, Big Blue would find himself being saved by Joe at several points in the story such as when Big Blue hijacks a train which is carrying some of his smartie brothers out to the desert where they would get hammers to the head by Dr Sour Sweet's zombie enforcers including his right-hand man Shark Head. Big Blue got caught straight away, and was chained up which is when Joe shows up and rescues him. With Joe Chicken's help who ironically had a pet chicken that an axe for a beak, Big Blue was able to escape from his chains which is when he realized that he was on the wrong train. The actual train carrying the smarties had never left the train station, and the train Big Blue was on was carrying the dreaded M&M Mini's. After the Mini's raided the M&M's Factory as a result of Yellow's carelessness, Red had asked Yellow to kill the minis in order to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again in the future. It was not in Yellow's nature to kill which he failed to realize made him a better candy than Red if such terms could be used. "What Red doesn't know can't hurt him." Yellow said as he used a forklift to carry the tubes of mini's over to the train where he hoped that the mini's would find themselves a new home somewhere where the wine tastes like wine and the snow is cold like a bold letter p. I'm talking about Aspen. Who the fuck wants to go to Aspen? Sorry. Thanks to Big Blue, the M&M mini's were released, and they went straight back to the M&M factory not that Red cared as he was busy flirting with Green who was impressed with the way that Red had somehow managed to get his entire body covered in little m's not just the middle like M&M's are normally designed. Before Werner and I parted ways, he mentioned that he wasn't really supposed to tell anyone about this as this was supposed to be a company secret. He had been sworn into secrecy by the higher ups at Nestle. I told Werner not to worry so much, but I could see the terror in his eyes. Sure enough, later that evening Werner was taken to the outback by a hitman hired by Nestle who had an egg for a head. Werner begged for custard, but the hitman who secretly loved Werner held his peace as he shot the fatal bullet into the chest of that beautiful German game developer.

As for me? I'm doing okay. I understand why my son didn't like the game, actually no i don't tell a lie I think that the game was great. I mean it I really do. I think it is one of the greatest games that I have ever played, and I am not just saying that because a Nestle executive has a gun held directly against my head. It's interesting to know that the game was going to be very different originally, but to be honest I think that the game is perfect just the way it is. I think that more parents should consider getting their kids Smarties; Meltdown for Christmas, and if they don't own a ps2 give them a pack of gummy worms and tell them to sell the worms and make up the money to buy themselves a PlayStation 2. Let them understand the meaning of hard work. That is all you can really hope to do, well if you'll excuse me I'm going to go to my local drive thru and order myself a lunch.