My Journey With Eating Healthy

Trying to Get a Good Grade in Super Grocery Shopper

If you haven't heard of the Flash game Super Grocery Shopper (which you probably haven't because you're normal), this is a mostly menu-based game where you buy groceries for 7 in-game days.

You're assigned a different budget and calorie goal/limit for each day, trying to manage a balanced diet with bonus objectives.

Some groceries can go on sale, and people are also actively buying groceries alongside you and putting them out of stock, providing an arbitrary time limit that you can easily work around by pausing the game.

Because of the innate gamer desire to not read tutorials, I had never read the tutorial for this in full and was thus always perplexed by the balanced diet objective of the game.

Your shopping cart in this game has the statistics of the groceries you're about to buy. The total costs, total amount of calories, and a diagram of your groceries on a food pyramid with a one-word descriptor on the healthiness of your food for today.

I have never seen this game call my shopping cart anything other than unhealthy, harmful, or dangerous.

At the end of each day when you check out your purchase, you're provided a statistics screen awarding you scores for how well you just shopped. It counts the amount of money left over in your budget, the bonus money for the bonus objective, and a section dedicated to counting your cumulative scores for the playthrough so far.

Next to these scores is also a field named "Balanced Diet Score", which I have never seen rise above 0.

Literally as I was writing this website I realized that the in-game tutorial explains how balanced diets work, so I truly have no idea how I had never seen that part of the tutorial until now.

My motivation for opening this website is due to me impulsively deciding to try to achieve both the bonus objective and the balanced diet bonus, which I had figured out from the help of a friend of mine, Jaiden.

I'd randomly decided to fuck around in the game while in a voice call with Jaiden, and she was curious to know exactly how you could achieve a balanced diet in this game. She also had the innate gamer desire to not read tutorials, so both of us were stumbling around like idiots trying to figure out how to eat good.

Since Jaiden has picked up programming for a couple years now, she asked me to open the game in a Flash decompiler to try to read the game's code, remembering that ActionScript was based on the ECMAScript standard.

This led to her trying to figure out how the game worked out its diet mechanic from the inside out, again with neither one of us ever thinking to check the tutorial.

I was screen sharing the code inside the Flash decompiler to her, and this led to her directing me to different functions and scripts, doing math and thinking for at least an hour amidst me trying not to interrupt the screen share too much while I was downloading and organizing scanlations of yaoi.

After a good while of her trying to figure out this game's excellent (lie) code, she had come up with an idea. In the game's food pyramid: Three groceries in the bottom tier, two in the next tier, one in the next, zero in the top tier. I booted up the game in a Flash projector and tested out this theory, and finally...

I had finally seen this game call my shopping healthy. (It was also below the calorie goal but you can just double your groceries) I pinged everyone in the group chat we were in with a screenshot of the accomplishment even though no one but me and Jaiden cared.

From here, we decided it would be pretty funny to try doing a playthrough of this game as perfectly as possible. Turns out this game is kinda bad so that proved to require a TON of luck.

This website is meant to catalogue six playthroughs we did.

The first day gave us a bit of a difficult bonus objective. It included an ice cream cone which is on the highest tier of the game's food pyramid, so we had to get some more bread and celery to balance that out. Jaiden also did some more math to get the proper ratio to get a healthy rating. Jaiden did all of the work in this journey.

The second day had a bonus objective that was basically nothing, it was groceries we had to purchase anyway.

The third day sent us to our untimely deaths. It was asking us to buy two fishes which cost 64 dollars each for some godforsaken reason. We did not have enough money left over to try to balance out our diet, so our first playthrough ended here.

The first day of our second playthrough literally started with an impossible objective to balance out?? It asked for two ice cream cones. One dangerous grocery required enough calories and money as is to balance out, but two is just ungodly. After reaching ten sacks of rice, we ran out of money. And we were 4000 calories over the limit anyway. I also decided from here to take higher resolution screenshots.

The first day of our third playthrough also literally started with an impossible objective to balance out. It was asking for sugar (spelled suger), a dangerous grocery, which wasn't too bad to balance out, but then to complete the balanced diet, we needed one kind of meat. Which is so weirdly expensive in the game?? We couldn't afford any meat, so this playthrough was also immediately over. In hindsight, we would've been able to do this if we swapped out the celery for carrots which were a dollar cheaper (allowing us to just barely afford steak), but it's a little too late now.

The first day of our fourth playthrough started with an objective that was possible, thank god. Also a practically nothing objective.

Ditto for day two.

Not ditto for day three. It asked for two dangerous groceries again. We also had under 100 dollars in our budget to add insult to injury.

The first day of our fifth playthrough started as usual again.

And it immediately gave us another impossible objective. Why in the holy name of God is the meat so expensive? We would have afforded the last sack of rice needed to pass this if it weren't for the steak costing 53 dollars.

I am now cataloguing our sixth and final playthrough.

Day one asked us for a bottle of palm oil, classified as dangerous, not too bad to balance out.

Day two went as usual.

Day three also had an easy objective, but a new issue sprung up. We were below our calorie goal for the day. The calorie mechanic of the game is not a suggestion like the balanced diet and bonus objectives. You literally cannot check out unless you're over the calorie goal and under the calorie limit. After doubling our groceries, we managed to just fit under the calorie limit. We literally had 28 calories to spare I don't know how we managed this.

Day four went the exact same as yesterday, giving us a near heart attack.

Day five had a weird objective, it was asking us for three unhealthy items, which prompted Jaiden to do some more math to figure out the ratio of a balanced diet with three in the unhealthy tier.

Day six was easy.

Day seven. Of course it had to throw the curveball at the final day.

You might be thinking, "That says healthy! Why are you saying it like you fucked up?" Look at the calories in the cart, and look at the calorie goals.

The store was also selling out of everything quickly, so we gave up before it got too depressing. But mostly because Jaiden was wanting to go to bed and I still had more yaoi to renumber.

All in all, this was a pretty funny experience. I didn't expect a kids Flash game about healthy eating with Super in the title to unintentionally provide social commentary on diets, but here we are.

I'm specifically writing all this because I'm hoping it'll spur a speedrunning community for this game, which Jaiden brought up first.

You can download the SWF file for this game here. Also if you're confused why the title bar of my Flash projector says Adobe Flash Player 34 instead of 32, it's because I'm a CleanFlash user.

Also also, I'm not sure if this has to be said, but you probably shouldn't take this game's depiction of healthy eating to heart. I think needing to eat more than ten sacks of rice to balance out two ice cream cones is a little ridiculous.

If you have stumbled upon an ancient secret hidden within the game, or want to yell at me about my eating habits, shout it at my Bluesky because my Twitter is private.

Don't stress out too much about healthy eating before you get wrinkles, don't stress out too much about getting wrinkles before you get more wrinkles, and have a good day. Thanks for reading!