Dr. Mario is one of sub-series of Nintendo flagship franchise: Super Mario. This title is a falling blocks puzzle game on NES. Dr. Mario is one of the classics that comes with Nintendo Online subscription.
So I started playing Nintendo Classics on Switch Lite's Nintendo Online's service, and there are many games that I'm not familiar with. I plan on writing about all of these NES/SNES games that I like in future articles.
After trying some of them, I stumbled upon Dr. Mario. I heard about the Doctor version of Mario before, especially from my limited exposure to Super Smash Bros. I was surprised however, when I read that his game was on the NES platform, all the images I saw about Dr. Mario were high-res after all. I thought his was a a 3DS or even a Wii game.
~ So I went into Dr. Mario game not knowing what to expect ~
"Wait? Is this a Tetris clone?" That was my first thought. Blocks, or should I say two colored Medicine Capsules are thrown by Mario and fall from the top of the screen. I knew that I have to match colors somehow, but for some reason, matching them didn't give me any score. So, I decided to play the game like Tetris and form a full horizontal line, but even that didn't work.
Dr. Mario like many NES titles didn't feature a tutorial. I believe if this game is released now there will be pages of unnecessary text as a tutorial. What a convenient time we live in~
It took me a full loss to realize that I was right about matching colors, I just did it the wrong way. Four blocks of the same color have to be matched. They must be aligned vertically or horizontally, not adjacent to each other like Puyo Puyo, or forming a whole row like Tetris. This is very similar to games like Bejeweled but I didn't instantly make the connection, because in the latter, the 'blocks' don't fall like in Tetris-like puzzles.
The goal of the game is to eliminate all the viruses on the screen. To do so, the player has to move the two-colored medical capsules Mario throws (as he takes the part of a doctor) and make three halves of capsules from the same color as a virus adjacent to it to make it disappear. The level is cleared after curing all viruses.
There are 20 Levels in the game, and there is a lot of customization. Before starting you can choose the level to start from and also the speed of the game. There's also the option to choose between two music tracks "fever" and "chill." The game is simple but these options prevent it from becoming stale for much longer.
The graphics aren't great even in NES standards but they do their job beautifully, the viruses look like the perfect balance between silly and mean. The three colors of the game uses for the viruses and the medicine halves used to kill them brilliantly complement each other: Red, Blue and Yellow.
I played it for an hour or two and it felt that there's an addictive loop to Dr. Mario, just like some other puzzle games in its genre. In the time I played it, I kept starting a new game every time I lost. While moderen games did everything Dr. Mario did better, the game still holds up as fun if you can look past the dated graphics. It's simplicity works in its favor!
Dr. Mario is one of the first games I tried in Nintendo Online's NES Classics and it's the only one that I played enough to review. I have other games I want to write about, like Super Mario Bros., Kirby, Metroid and Legend of Zelda, before tackling their sequels on the SNES!
