#111: Captain Novolin

Suck it, giant evil donut!

I first learned about the existence of this game earlier this year while watching Awesome Games Done Quick. One might think that this game would therefore be awesome, but it was in the subsection they run called 'Awful Games Done Quick'. Ruh-roh!

Your SNES is not a licensed doctor.

This game was designed to teach kids about diabetes. Donuts and hot fudge sundaes are evil and will kill you if you touch them. Each level has good food pickups you can make, but if you pick up too many of them then you also die. Presumably if you pick up too few that would be bad too, but I had a hard time not picking up the pick-ups in a platformer. Gotta catch them all! You're routinely forced to check your blood sugar level, inject yourself with insulin, read factoids about diabetes, and answer quizzes about the factoids.

This game has jumped the sundae.

I remember hearing from people's donation comments during AGDQ that this game was actually reasonable for helping kids learn about their diabetes. That's fantastic for it. But it's an atrocious game! It's a platformer where you can't go backwards and there are no platforms. Move in a straight line avoiding or killing the big sugary things while hitting most of the small things.

The controls are also terrible. Your only attack option is to jump in the air then hit down to stomp. I didn't realize this the first time I tried and couldn't beat the first level. I went and found a control listing online and found out how to kill things and made it pretty far into a very short game. The game only uses one button, which sucks. I hate when games only use one button. (Jump, in this case.)

Maybe edutainment is a real thing worthy of praise, but I'm looking at if I'd have wanted to actually play this game now, or back when I was a kid, and the answer to both questions is no. But it probably did some good in the world, so it gets to escape an F rating.

Rating: D-