Dr. Mario

The Good
I am a big fan of Tetris, it is one my most favorite time-sinks and back in the day you looked bad-ass playing it when in the bus. The game was very simple, you had to form lines using oddly shaped blocks, whenever a line was full it would disappear. I spent many hours playing this game on my old Gameboy and NES and beating the previous owner's highscore on my Nintendo Entertainment System is among one my most cherished moments in all my time as a video game enthusiast. Dr. Mario is on equal terms with the legendary game it is based on.

Instead of just mindlessly copying Tetris the goal has changed slightly, there is a number of colored viruses on the field that are removed when you stack similarly colored pills on them. The trick is that the pills have to sides with different colors and that the pills break in two if one side disappears. This can lead to difficult moments where completing one stack (4 colors) can lead to the wrong color falling on another block. It's a pretty nice variation on the original concept and it works very well.

The game gradually increases in difficulty as you finish levels, in this case by increasing the amount of viruses on the screen and locating them in challenging positions (such a pit created by a wall of other viruses. I must say that this is an improvement over the original's approach of just increasing the speed of the falling blocks because that made it nearly impossible to think about your moves in the later levels, but then again it didn't have the advantage of having blocks already placed in the game.

The Bad
The Mario license is not really apparent anywhere, to begin with there is no Princess Peach or Bowser anywhere in the game. They only character is Mario himself who apparently graduated with a PhD in Health sciences. It feels like a bit of a waste to stitch the name "Mario" to a game and then exclude everything that people recognize. Why couldn't the viruses be Goomba's or why couldn't there be patients in cut-scenes that resembled characters from the series (Peach, Toad, Luigi and etc.).

There is not a lot of settings you can change here, essentially you can tweak exactly the same as in Tetris, which makes it a bit of a waste of money. The problem is that if Tetris would have another game mode with blocks already placed in the levels, this game would be obsolete.

The Bottom Line
Tetris is fun and the only thing you need to do in order to make a good variation on the game is a good bit of creativity. Nintendo clearly had this and they managed to make an entertaining Tetris variant, that while needlessly possessing the Mario license, is a very entertaining and unique game. While the settings you can tweak are still the same, it's still clear that these are two different games that are both entertaining to play in their own way.

The game is a rather enjoyable puzzle game that both the kids and the older people will love, give it a try if you see a cheap copy somewhere. This is a purchase you won't regret.

The Good
Dr. Mario is a game which is extremely easy to pick up and play. The gameplay and controls are simple enough that anyone can learn to play with minimal effort. As far as sound is concerned, the effects are nothing spectacular, but not obstructive to gameplay either. However, the music, in my opinion, is brilliant. There are two songs included, Fever and Chill, which are very catchy and fit the frantic puzzle action of the game well. Finally, the inclusion of a two-player vs. mode is very welcomed as well.

The Bad
Mario storylines are supposed to be...different, but the story line behind Dr. Mario seemed stranger than usual and rushed, as there is only half of a page addressing the story line in the manual. Granted it's a puzzle game and the story is not a huge part of the gameplay, but I still would have liked a little more depth to the story. Also, the graphics are nothing amazing, but, on the other hand, they really don't need to be. Finally, while part of the charm of this game stems from its simplistic gameplay, this leads to its drawback of quickly becoming somewhat repetitive.

The Bottom Line
Dr. Mario is a puzzle game in which your objective is to kill all of the viruses in a jar. The viruses come in three colors (red, blue, and yellow) as do the pills which are used to kill the viruses. The pills contain two "sections" which allows for either a pill with two of the same colors or two different colors. A horizontal or vertical line of 4 or more "sections" of the same color will cause the line to disappear. So, one must strategically place the falling pills in line with the like-colored virus in order to kill it. If the jar is filled with pills and there are still viruses present, then it is game over.

The Good
Was Nintendo looking to cash in on the mindless, repetitive entertainment market opened up by the international smash hit Tetris? Only the top executives at Nintendo know for sure. But in any case, this game rocks.

Based on a similar premise as Tetris, this game has the player manipulating the orientation of objects falling at an ever-quickening velocity. Dr. Mario just happens to make those objects colored pills rather than ambiguous quad-part blocks. Match up colors with the malignant viruses in a bottle in order to wipe them out. Build up skill and go for the double, triple, quadruple kill/cures... and beyond!

The game features a handicapping player versus player mode. Two players can get their own bottles of viruses to wipe out and they can select different difficulty levels to play at. Best 2 out of 3 rounds wins the match. Especially fiendish is when one player scores a double kill/cure or better-- the game sends down some random pills into the other player's jar that may or may not mess them up.

Is it arrogant to state that I especially enjoy this game simply because I am so good at it? I challenged many friends (well, they used to be friends; perhaps I should not have gloated so hard) at this game, at all handicapping levels, and no one ever managed to beat me without a handicap.

I summed up Dr. Mario in this review as "mindless entertainment". Curiously, the longer you play, the more lethal you potentially become. As you build up skill it just becomes natural to construct precariously balanced towers of pills that will kill off 5, 6, 7 viruses as soon as you trigger a chain reaction with a certain pill. Do not attempt to try this before you are adequately skilled or else you will just cause a mess in your own jar, as anyone who has ever played against me has learned the hard way.

The Bad
Do not attempt to play the game on a black and white television set. That's something that stuck in my mind from the time I rented this game. Seems obvious. But in the early 1990's, who was still stuck using a black and white television? Apparently, someone who rented this game from this store before me.

As is common with these puzzle games, not a whole lot of effort was invested into the background music. The result is mind-numbing music which may cause you to question your sanity after several straight hours of gameplay.

The Bottom Line
Fear the Dr. Mario game master (that's me).