 Mmm.... That's drunk. You've been thrilled by the Avengers, you've been wowed by the X-Men, you've fought for justice with Batman and Superman, and have had totally righteous tubular radical times with the Ninja Turtles. Now it's time to get educated about the dangers of smoking with the health heroes. Yeah, this was a real thing promoted by publisher Reia Systems. They put out games like the Bronchiosaurus, which I've covered before, Pacquian Marlin, which will get its own video someday, and the infamous Captain Novelin, and please don't make me do a video on that one. This video is about Rex Ronin, experimental surgeon, and that title seriously makes it sound like an SNL sketch from the early 90s, and I'm inclined to think that because while the cover makes Rex look kind of sorta like Keanu Reeves if you squint a bit, the sprite in the game makes him look like Kevin Nealon. So one day Rex Ronin gets a patient named Jake Westborough, a successful tobacco salesman with a beautiful wife and a great car, and clearly Rico Tubbs and Steven Colbert are teeming with jealousy. But now Jake is dying, in all caps, from smoking the very tobacco he sold. Not even Jake's Chrysler LeBaron can save him now. Rex deems Jake to be an excellent candidate for experimental surgery, so Rex shrinks himself down to microscopic size to allow him to actually go into Jake's body and clear out all of the cancer and disease. Gotta love when games use transitive property like that. Oh, he's a surgeon, so then obviously he's smart enough to throw together an experiment to somehow shrink himself down and wander around inside someone's face. You start out in your patient's mouth, wandering around cleaning tar off his teeth, and wait a second, why does my patient have tiny robots flying around in his mouth? Well, turns out big tobacco caught wind of Rex Ronin's experiment and somehow got a hold of the patient before he went to the hospital and secretly injected microbots into the patient to stop Rex from spreading word about the dangers of smoking. Okay, if he'd rather spend billions on tiny robots instead of just killing the guy, I guess that works. And from Rex's perspective, wouldn't these small explosions do more damage to the patient than smoking ever would? I mean, I'd be smoking a lot more than tobacco if I had all this crap flying around in my arteries. You get a health meter with three lives and three continues to get through nine levels. You start out cleaning the teeth, and then you jump down this dude's throat and zap some phlegm. Before you get to the lungs where you clear out cancer cells, you also clear out the bronchial tubes, a couple arteries, and the heart before ending up inside the brain. This is actually a cool idea for a game, and it could have worked if it didn't suck so badly. The controls are terrible, mostly because your jump is just the worst. Rex insists on doing a flip and landing on his back like a kid on a trampoline. He does this every single time he jumps. It reminds me of the jump in Wolverine Adamantium Rage, another terrible game. It doesn't help that the level design here is filled with lots of uneven platforms. You're walking on a gumline or climbing around on neurons and blood vessels, but that doesn't stop Rex from needlessly launching himself into the air like an idiot before rolling around in this guy's fluids. Rex also has two different kicks for some reason, a jump kick and a roundhouse kick, and they're both equally ineffective. You're mainly gonna use your laser beam thing, which you can collect upgrades for. The gameplay may be lousy, but I'll give the game credit from an educational standpoint. I mean, this is a thorough explanation of the effects of sucking down heaters. There's plenty of text laying out what you're actually doing in the game. There's random biology questions you gotta answer, although most of them are really easy. It's just true and false questions. Reya systems even brought in a doctor from Stanford University as a consultant, although you don't need to be a doctor to know that shoe causes cancer. If the answer is true, you grab the bomb and it blows up every enemy on screen. If the answer is false, you leave it alone, and if you accidentally grab it, which is always a possibility with these crappy controls, then you take damage. Despite good intentions, the game itself is just bad. I mean, you don't even have to do anything. All you have to do is make it to the end of each level. You can just leave your patient as a diseased husk. And the game is cool with that, as long as you make it to the end with some health left. For me, the best part of the gameplay is cleaning up stuff like this. It's like a 16 bit version of Power Wash Simulator. You do have a few rail shooter sections like this, which I always like, but they're bare bones and only about a minute long. So yeah, I would say Rex Ronin Experimental Surgeon is probably the best of the health heroes games, and by best, I mean least worst. I like the idea for this game, and it could have worked, but man, I get some major pitfighter vibes from this game. The developer Sculptured Software had a hand in lots of good stuff for the Super Nintendo, like the Super Star Wars games, but this is not their finest hour. The only value I can find in Rex Ronin is that maybe somebody could potentially reskin and retool this game so it's based on the movie Innerspace. That would be fun, but as it is, you're definitely gonna want to avoid Rex Ronin Experimental Surgeon any way you can. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.