 Ssssssss… that's drunk. Last week I talked about one of the four Health Heroes games published by Reia Systems, Rex Ronan Experimental Surgeon, and as you might expect, it's not good. Oh, but there's worse. Yes, it's time to talk about your hero in mind, Captain Novelin. But this one actually has a bit of an interesting backstory. Novelin is actually a brand of Insulin, and funding for this game came from Novelin manufacturer's Novin Nordisk, as well as from the National Institutes of Health. Novo Nordes gave out over 10,000 free copies of Captain Novelin to hospitals to help young kids understand how to live with diabetes. And before you start the game, you're asked to enter a three-digit code which you would have gotten from your doctor so the game can accurately represent what you, the player, requires for a healthy diet to help manage your blood sugar. So in essence, the game allows players with diabetes to practice treating it. The game starts out showing our hero on a treadmill deep underground in his diabetes headquarters and a person who I can only presume is Wilford Brimley interrupts him to say that aliens disguised as sugary junk food have landed on the captain's hometown of Mount Way up there and they captured fellow diabetic Mayor Gooden who only has enough diabetes supplies for 48 hours so it's up to you to find him and help him out before the time limit expires. Then a blonde Wendy Williams shows up to tell you that you need to check your blood sugar at least four times a day and you're shown a glucose meter where you have to match the color of your current blood sugar with the color on the scale and you know that might actually look closer to Rebecca from Ted Lasso. But anyway, she gives you your recommended insulin dose. Then Carl Winslow shows up to tell you what you should be eating. Hey, there's a lot of useful info here for kids that might have been new to this sort of thing at the time and it's clear that Reya Systems had plenty of experience developing software for medical facilities so of course they took on the attitude of hey how hard could it be to make a video game? Well it's pretty dang hard it turns out because this game is seriously awful. Right away when you glance at the screen and you hear the music you see this game has the vibe of a DOS shareware game that came free with an issue of EGM back in 1989. Sure this game was given away for free to hospitals but it also carried the same list price of any other Super Nintendo game at the time of around 40 to 50 dollars and you'd have to have a lot more health problems and diabetes to pay that kind of price for this crap. Captain Novelin doesn't appear to have any powers besides uh having diabetes some superhero that is. All you gotta do is collect the right foods and avoid the wrong foods so bananas and toast are okay but giant bouncing donuts and mutant cereal boxes with legs are not. But you still gotta be careful not to eat too much food or else you just fall over and die. That's some questionable accuracy there. There's also a clock you have to abide by so you need to get to the halfway point in the stage by a certain time so you can check your blood sugar again. You also get prompted with trivia questions which of course are very simple. Carl Winslow comes back and tells you what you're allowed to eat for lunch based on the stuff you've picked up so far and that's the basic gist of how the game goes. Level 2 has you on a boat, level 3 you're in a forest, and then you're in the mountains before you get to the alien base and fight the final boss and rescue the mayor all while getting prompts to take insulin shots and answer trivia questions. Hey I give the game all the credit for having good intentions for teaching kids how to manage their blood sugar but oh I'm really supposed to enjoy your crappy game because you had good intentions. Seriously the gameplay here is utterly terrible. The jump is one of the worst I've ever seen in any game. It's so slow and clunky and your sprite is ginormous so it's easy to take damage no matter what you do. There's a total of maybe four or five enemy patterns throughout the entire playthrough which by the way only lasts about 15 minutes total. One thing I should point out that the manual barely mentions is that if you want to jump on top of an enemy you have to hold down while you're in the air otherwise you just take damage. I have to point out the sound design here too because it's just freaking hilarious. Just like Rex Ronin Experimental Surgeon Captain Novelin was also developed in part by Sculptured Software but you can't lay too much blame on them. Check out this feature in Nintendo Power. Rhea Systems actually had the game storyboarded before going to Sculptured Software and hey they accurately brought their crappy vision to life. Although it's also worth mentioning that Nintendo Power did not give either Rex Ronin or Captain Novelin a proper review presumably because both those games would have gotten the lowest scores in Nintendo Power history. So yeah Captain Novelin was a novel idea imagine that. And I'm sure it helped some young kids understand how to regulate their blood glucose but as a game it is horrendous. Everything about this game screams cheap. The graphics are cheap. The gameplay feels cheap. The level design just has you go from left to right. The game is dreadfully boring and the music sounds like rejected material from Lester the unlikely. It's got that blaring out-of-tune horn sound that dominates everything. Sitting down to play this game feels like you're just constantly beaten over the head with how bad it is. It's a relentless reminder of how bad video games can truly be. So this is another game you're gonna want to avoid any way you can. All right I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.