Dr. Mario

"A savage political attack, and one helluva great puzzler as well."

After all the years I've owned a GameBoy (given to me when I was six by an obnoxious spoiled cousin), an exhaustive write-up of Doctor Mario was inevitable. It was one of the first games I bought with my meager allowance, and at the time it was outrageously expensive for a hand-held game ($35 at the shabby K-Mart) but I was totally convinced that it would rock. Looks like my Gamer's Intuition was emerging from under the rock of my subconscious -- needless to say I was incredibly pleased with what I played at age six. I found some old GB titles I had secreted away in an old suitcase; among them was my ancient copy of Doctor Mario, and I found myself hooked all over again when I replayed on the slightest of whims. How ironic... a doctor who WANTS to addict you to something other than expensive steroids.

The premise for this title is simplicity itself. Use Mario's ever-likable presence and ''I can fix anything from leaky faucets to abductions of royalty by tortoises'' spirit and use it to make a hyper-addictive puzzle game as well as to tackle some persistent Real-World Problems. Here the Real-World Problem is viral outbreaks and the containment of them, in particular. Mario has now donned a doctor's lab coat and, with the help of an unseen Nurse Toadstool, must face the second-worst day of his life. Luigi is missing, presumably off breaking someone's kneecaps to teach them to avoid the late payment of medical dues. Villainous Bowser is (predictably) absent as well, but he never plays a role in this game -- no, that goes to the evil Multi-Hued Creatures who take over Bowser's position as the antagonist(s). See, Nintendo has always been unafraid to address topical issues in their broad-minded Mario games, such as the benefits of being blinded by lust or the fact that being greedy and stealing as much gold as you can will indeed advance you further in life than not taking anything at all.

Now a new plight sweeps 'cross the Mushroom Kingdom, and that problem indeed affects America's youngsters infinitely more than being abducted by thuggish Goombas ever will. That problem is Disease, and it still sweeps the world like a plague (hee hee) even in these Communist-Free times. Indeed it is not a revolutionary concept to involve the Gamer in fighting real-life problems. In 1988, you filled the shoes of a fantastical DEA agent in the groan-inducing NARC; in 1982 you took on the role of a zookeeper containing an animal escape in the aptly-titled Zookeeper; and in 1989 you went inside a human body to eliminate treacherous cancer cells in the shooter LifeForce. Now it is 1990, and Reagan has finally left the White House to be replaced by a far more liberal President (snicker). Nintendo dispatches a talented development team to adequately reflect this radical paradigm shift and entertain children simultaneously, putting certain priorities before others. As mentioned before, they chose to abandon the traditional adventure elements in favor of a simple-at-heart puzzler (and in hindsight, Dr. Mario would not have made a decent adventure game unless your role was to squash lecherous lumberjacks who devastate a forest that houses plants which produce anti-cancer drugs, but they already made a movie out of that). All the action here takes place inside Mario's small medical practice, where he must exterminate a host of smugly overconfident germs inside a huge bottle.

This indeed sounds bizarre when committed to paper, and it would only take the Japanese to greenlight a germ-fighting game. Without much of an introduction, you're suddenly looking at a screen containing the huge bottle snugly holding all the germs, and Mario sits in the upper right-hand corner. From his vantage point he will throw in a colored medicine tablet, which you must line up with the appropriately colored germ cell. Puzzler aficionados will recognize the gameplay as being way too remniscent of Tetris and the title grossly misleading -- you aren't playing Mario, you're playing a pill! Yes indeed, after the viral outbreak, a friendly pharmesutical company was willing to sell an antidote wholesale to Mario's independent medical practice, and it's not all that complicated to match up the hues with the parasites. On the limited color palette of the GameBoy, the viruses are either white, polka-dotted, or black. Likewise for the pills, and since they are comprised of two sections, they can either be made up wholly of one color or a combination of two. Pressing either A or B will rotate the pill 90 degrees as it plummets to the bottom (more Tetris elements at work), and the idea is to line up three pill-sections of the appropriate color with a corresponding virus, which will make it explode like one of those cartoon roaches in a Raid commercial. Any leftover pill-quadrants of other colors will then fall down either to the bottom or into the hungry mouth of another Virus, which can then lead you to create devastating Combos. If there are two viruses beside each other, it only takes two pill-sections to make both explode, and likewise if there are two viruses situated two pill-section-lengths apart. Bleagh!

It seems like there is way too much to remember when you're busy rotating pills and letting gravity do its thing, and this fact is hammered home when you suddenly realise that gravity magically starts to pull harder and harder on your medicine tablets as time progresses, affording you even less time to move it into position. This is indeed one of those games where if you break your concentration for a split-second to check on how much time is left on your Evangelion hentai video download, you will flub up and almost invariably fill up the screen to the brim of the bottle and lose. If you manage to keep your concentration, however, you're in for a remarkably intense gaming experience. You'll start out nice and slow with ample time to line up combos, but if you keep lollygagging for far too long you're in for a world of crap. The pills will hurtle down towards the bottom faster than you can line up the right colors. Every time your pill moves down a ''notch'', there is an appropriate beeping noise -- at the zenith of your struggle, the GameBoy will be producing undulations that sound more like frantic Morse Code signals from a torpedoed oil tanker. The tension mounts, your palms suddenly start to sweat like crazy and grease up the back of your faithful GameBoy and consequently reduce your grip on the damn thing, you'll stop thinking about strategy and more about killing all the viruses, who leer at you from the lower right-hand corner of the screen in large, recognisable forms (they reel and thrash about whenever a fellow virus explodes -- a nice touch). You'll stir nervously in your seat. You'll make careless mistakes.

You'll stare brilliance straight in the eye.

Yes, this is how to skillfully create tension in a video game. Don't bother putting up a timer (one of my biggest pet peeves), throwing in characters whose sole purpose is to make you nervous (see the ''commander'' in Silent Scope), or flashing messages on the screen that inform you of how royally screwed you are. In Dr. Mario you have all the time in the world to complete a screen, and therein lies what will trap you. Nintendo erects the ingenious façade of an easy-going puzzler, then tears off the mask as you're waist-deep in a level. Indeed this encourages you not to scream in horror and throw the GB at the wall, but to persevere. How?

If the sound effects increase the tension -- aside from the annoying six-note melody that rings out whenever you pull off a combo, which seems to have been added to give the insecure gamer an aural confirmation of having Done Something Cool -- the music either fans the flames or cools your jets. I'd have to say that the music is Dr. Mario's lifeblood, the heart and soul of the game. At any rate you have two songs to choose from before leaping into a game: ''Fever'', a frantic 2/2 piece that really gets the blood boiling with tons of percussion solos and a suitably catchy rhythm to boot; and its exact inverse, the mellow, lucid ''Chill'', which I immediately took a liking to when I was in Kindergarten. This tune is in a far slower tempo, which sounds more like progressive jazz but then builds into a satisfying climax before it loops again. All these years later, both brilliant songs are stuck in my head, and over the years I have even made up lyrics to match the music (which are far too embarassing to share with the rest of the world... sorry). Either track works very well with the game, whether you feel the need to be driven forward or to ''chill'' (hee hee) out instead.

Dr. Mario keeps a lid on the Anti-Reagan commentary until the end, when the game suddenly reaches this completely absurdist climax that will only piss people off instead of motivating them to keep playing and re-elect Bush. Of course it's a cruel, biting satire of Ronald Reagan's policies regarding Medicare (which have even affected the proud Mushroom Kingdom!) on the inside, but on the outside it's a fun, hugely addictive, offbeat puzzle game. Mario once again teaches youngsters a few subtle lessons about life -- always trust Italian doctors, inside appearances aren't always vital to the enjoyment of something, and TAKE YOUR DAMN VITAMINS.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/28/03, Updated 05/28/03