Gameplay Basics:
Basic Dr Mario Setups You drop medical tablets from the top of the well one by one. Each tablet consists of two pieces which can be either red, yellow, or blue. You can move the tablets, and rotate them like in Tetris. To make pieces disappear, you must line up four or more pieces of the same color, either horizontally or vertically.
The well starts out with between 3 and 100 virii, which must be eliminated to progress to the next level. Virii come in red, blue, and yellow, and act just like pieces, except that they do not obey gravity.

 


Two Player Mode:
In 2-player mode, the winner is the player who eliminates their virii faster. You can send garbage to the other player by setting up chains, like on the right. When the yellow virii vanish, the unattached blue capsules will fall onto the other blue capsule and virus, and all four will be eliminated. Dr Mario Combo
Setting off a level 2 chain, like above, sends 2 pieces of garbage. Level 3 and 4 chains send 3, and 4 pieces of garbage. Anything above that only sends 4 pieces of garbage. Also, since the garbage that falls is one of three possible colors, there's a 1 in 3 chance it will match up with the piece it lands on, actually helping your opponent.

However, each unit of garbage that you send falls at a painstakingly slow rate from the top of the screen - It takes approximately 5 seconds for a piece of garbage to fall all the way to the bottom of the well. For this reason, garbage in Dr. Mario serves mostly to slow your opponent down.

 


Strategies:

Stick to vertical matches unless you are extremely strapped for space. Generally speaking, you should place all of your medical tablets horizontally, so that each half of the tablet is the same color as the piece beneath it. Not necessarily directly beneath it, but so that if the piece falls, it will land on the matching piece. Or, in other words, you should try to avoid placing tablets so that they are on top of a piece of a different color.

Don't bother setting up chains past level 2, as the benefits for large combos are not very good. However, it can be beneficial to set up several level 2 chains one right after another - If you're quick, your opponent will have to watch two, or maybe three sets of garbage fall down his screen seperately, before he gets to place another piece.

Sending garbage really early on in the game can totally shut down your opponent. For instance, if you manage to send your opponent a mis-matched garbage piece in the top 3 rows, the only way they can get rid of it is horizontally, or from beneath, both of which are extremely difficult and time-consuming!

 


Review:

The 2-player mode of this game is less interactive than other puzzle-fighting games... Unlike Tetris Attack and Puyo Puyo, garbage sending is not required, because your opponent does not have to die for you to win. So if you are a good doctor, and care more about saving your patient than killing your opponent's patient, you can play a very polite game and finish quickly, without interacting very much.

The 1-player mode is very enjoyable, and the game speed increases steadily as you play, so the game is still challenging even when you're down to your last 10-15 virii.

I have not played the Game Boy version. If you are contemplating buying it, remember that you will probably be restricted to the 1-player mode, unless you know another person with Dr. Mario for the Game Boy. I don't believe there is an opponent AI for the Game Boy version of Dr. Mario.

The NES version is great. The sound and music is very catchy, the graphics are as good as the NES can deliver. It controls well and has all of the same graphical features as the SNES version, except for the backgrounds, which you probably won't notice anyways. You'll need a friend if you want to enjoy the 2-player battle mode.

The SNES version is not so great. The sound and music is much worse than on the NES - They replaced several of the intsruments so that the music does not sound good at all. Fortunately they included the feature to turn it off. The animation sequences on the SNES are no longer animated. However, they did add a nice "Vs. Com" option, which allows you to battle with a computer player of varying difficulty. The computer player is skilled enough to win games against experienced players.

Go ahead and click on the dancing virii to go back to the main page.

 BACK... Surely anything that dances this well could not be for killing!