Dr. Mario
System: NES
Release Date: October 1990
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Puzzle
Viruses, germs, and disease are out to get you in Dr. Mario! Match four gameplay comes to the Nintendo Entertainment System by way of giving Mario yet another profession. This time, it’s up to everyone’s favorite plumber to don the lab coat and become, of all things, a pill pusher! Twenty levels of difficulty stand between you and… I dunno, fame? Fortune? Victory.
Dr. Mario throws multi color pills into a jar and you have to maneuver them in a way to destroy the viruses inside. The pills… errr… vitamins… come in some combination of three colors, blue, yellow, and red. They can be rotated to placed horizontally or vertically, but the pill remains attached to itself. To destroy the viruses, there have to be four like colors sequentially in a row. This can be any combination of virus or vitamin. If half a pill is obliterated, the other half will fall to the depth below.
The A and B Buttons rotate the vitamins in opposite directions. The goal is to maneuver the pill into the proper place you want. This doesn’t seem difficult, but when you’re not sure what side of the capsule will be rotated, you can get yourself into a heap of trouble.
The first levels have few viruses and are a cinch to complete. Each level increases the number of germs to destroy by four. This gets pretty unruly as you get into the teens. I found myself trying to thread pills in between viruses to kill them more efficiently. What would end up happening is I would bury a virus in a sea of multi colored vitamins, making getting to it difficult. By this point, it may be best not to be fancy, but win by any means necessary. You only get points by killing viruses, anyway.
There is a two player mode where as you clear viruses you drop vitamin pieces in the other player’s jar, but I had no one to play with, so don’t expect any footage…
Graphics: 1.5
Nothing particularly fun to look at, but at least it isn’t awful.
Sound: 1.5
I can only hear the Brentalfloss rendition of Fever. It’s nonstop. Please help me.
Gameplay: 2.0
Three colors, lots of viruses as the levels move on. I’ve never been able to get the rotation down correctly.
Difficulty: 2.0
The game becomes exponentially harder when you pass level 10. This is fine if Dr. Mario is your puzzle game of choice…
Fun Factor: 1.0
It’s never been my puzzle game of choice. Give me Tetris or Columns any day.
Overall Rating: 1.6
Dr. Mario earns a C-. I don’t really care for the NES version of Dr. Mario and think it’s one of the lousier titles Nintendo developed.