Dr. Mario

For reasons unknown to us, we’ve always had a vendetta against Dr. Mario. We think it spawns from us spending five dollars for Dr. Mario Express for dsi and not enjoying it, thus meaning we wasted five dollars. But Dr. Mario was a pretty popular early Game Boy title, so its time for retribution has come. And, oh dear, we found ourselves having fun with it!

The gameplay of Dr. Mario is pretty simple, there are three colors of viruses you have to kill by making rows of four, the virus included. On the NES the colors are red, yellow, and blue, but here it’s light green, black, and spotted. The different virus colors are distinguishable enough on an actual GB screen, but there were a few times during our screenshot capture process where we got black and spotted mixed up and it ruined our building. Pills stick together until you pop a virus, at which point they become singular dots and fall, which can kill more viruses and give you some bonus points. You can choose what level to start at and how fast you want your current pill to fall, and that’s all you need.

There’s also a multiplayer mode that we can’t test out here, but we have played the NES version pretty extensively and it’s pretty fun! You don’t send garbage, you mostly focus on clearing your board before the other player, which gets you a point, first to three points wins. We have a few nits to pick that come with a game like this, mainly that we wish we could double tap in single-wide alleys to do a 180 degree spin of a pill, like you can in Puyo Puyo, post-tsu.

Our main problem with Dr. Mario is that if you get yourself in a jam, it takes a very, very long time to dig yourself out of it. At medium speed pieces move so fast that you may not be able to maneuver one under a virus, if you’re trying to wedge it in to make a break. It can be really annoying to not get a piece you need and spend multiple minutes trying to dig out so you can go to the next stage, and do it all again.

But hey, combos! When you make a two-break combo a little jingle plays, endlessly satisfying. Better jingles probably play when you get higher combos but it’s hard to plan ahead like that when you’re a scrub. Watching tournament play of Dr. Mario is intense, it would be super cool to get good at this game. And with the fun we were having, we may end up doing just that. This game is great fun, especially when you’re playing at low speed so you have time to think. We’ll have to get a real copy of this, our flash cart annihilates batteries.

One last thing, you can adjust the amount of viruses at the start from 1 to 20, so naturally we had to try going up to 20 just to see how far we could-

Oh, well that was quick.