What's with the health items?!

Two weeks before my release of Chap DM 3, I became aware of some controversy revolving around the use of the red cross on health kits in video games. I can't actually even remember how I stumbled into this information now. My first reaction was, "well, fuck 'em". I'd read some complaints about the replacement using a pill in some other version of Doom that I never bothered to purchase. I guess this is what it looks like:

The discussion I was reading on the ZDoom forum was nine years old. Of course, it was still news to me. I've no problem with people accusing me of living under a rock; I can really be out of it when it comes to hot topics, trivia, and such. A quick internet search will reveal that indeed some powers that be do indeed take issue with a stupid symbol being used in video games:

Never mind how stupid I think this is now in retrospect. At the time of me reading that forum, I was in a kind of problem solving mode while assembling all my resources into one fat wad file to get this thing out the door and this just represented one more item on a very long to-do list.

Reading how some people were in favor of using a green cross instead, I was reminded of a certain Thursday Night Football game in 2015 where Nike really screwed up with their color rush (push) on fancy thematic uniforms. So, a green cross instead of red would be less than an ideal solution. My first thought would be to simply replace the cross with a heart as the heart is used as a mnenomic in other video games, such as Zelda. It would be easy as hell to whip up in M$ Paint. But then my creative side slaps my problem solving side around a bit; "YOU'RE MISSING AN OPPORTUNITY!!"

That's when I came up with the idea of using the happy smiley face instead.