Dr. Mario Express (Video Game Review)

Video Game Review
Dr. Mario Express
Nintendo DSi (DSiWare)
2009
Developer: Akira
Publisher: Nintendo

Years ago, a simple Russian puzzle game had the world addicted to a video game. Nintendo was smart enough to bundle Tetris with their brand new Game Boy handheld and they used it as a means to dominate the handheld market without much detraction. While people loved Mario, the masses craved puzzle games. Before the arrival of the Super Nintendo system, Nintendo released a simple, yet time-absorbing puzzle game called Dr. Mario. It combined the appeal of a puzzle game with the quality that Nintendo’s mascot had become associate with. Dr. Mario Express for DSiWare is a remake of the original title with a lot missing. At the core, the game is the same, but there are no extras to be found. Nintendo is attempting to re-unleash this game on the masses with an extremely cheap price of $5. This might be the right price for you if you don’t care about any online interactivity or multiplayer options.

Dr. Mario is a simple puzzle game. On the playing field, or medicine jar, you’ll have viruses of different colours that you must eliminate. There are only three different colours of viruses throughout the entire game; red, blue, and yellow. Mario stands at the top of the screen throwing pills of different colours to kill the germs while you control where the pills land. Each pill is actually two pills put together and they can be any combination of the three colours or they can be one complete colour (which means you have two pieces of ammo the same colour). Your job is to line up the pills so that there’s a combination of four or more (i.e., either three parts of a pill and a virus or two parts of a pill and two viruses). Unused pills lay clutter up the medicine jar but with viruses, if you line up four of the same colour, they disappear. The playing field remains the same size no matter which level you are on but as the levels increase, so do the number of viruses. You choose the speed at the beginning of the game so the speed does not increase until you stop the game and restart it with a new speed. You get points for clearing viruses and more points if you clear viruses by a chain reaction. Scores don’t add up between levels. If you do really well at scoring chain reactions in an earlier level, that high score may stick for several levels afterwards if you don’t do so well with the subsequent levels.

It helps that the controls are incredibly easy. The d-pad moves the active pills around while the up button does a quick drop if you’re secure in where you want the pill to drop. The B button rotates the pill counterclockwise while the A button rotates the pill counterclockwise. The controls have not changed in twenty years and they don’t really need to. You have total control of what’s going on unless you become panicked and start making mistakes all over the place. The music fits the mood too. The classic sounds are still here although they are updated so they don’t sound as tinny as they did coming from the NES. The music speeds up when you are in danger which almost makes it feel it is going as fast as your pulse. Thankfully, Mario doesn’t make a stupid noise every time he throws a pill into the playing area. That deserves some bonus points right there.

Dr. Mario is a fun game and is a timeless classic in its own right. Dr. Mario really brought the concept of ‘match 4 (or 3)’ games to a growing video game audience. It’s incredibly satisfying to hit a chain command that feels endless although it’s only seems feasible to do in the middle levels unless you’re an amazing player. The game is only as complicated as you make it out to be. Like Tetris, every time you see the game over screen, the only compulsion you have is to play at least one more game.

Even as great as a game as Dr. Mario is, this ‘Express’ version is the most gimped version readily available to people. There is a version available on the Wii that costs $10 and not only does it offer local multiplayer but also online multiplayer as well. As well, it comes with the addictive Virus Buster mini-game that was originally released as part as a secret in the Brain Age series. The DSi version of Dr. Mario, is a lot of fun but only if you’re playing by yourself. However, Dr. Mario single player game is still one of the best puzzle games ever. The only other problem with the game is the small size of the playing field. Considering you have two screens to play with, the playing field is reduced to half of one screen. Mario and the upcoming pills occupy the other half of the bottom screen. On the top screen are the score and the dancing viruses jeering at you. If you have problems making out small objects, this could be a problem; even with the larger DSi screens. It would have been nice if they had put the action across the two screens or did something to increase the size of the action instead of wasting valuable real estate. Copy editors would freak out if they saw so much wasted space in their publications.

All in all, Nintendo’s Dr. Mario Express for the DSi is a fun game. It’s just not equipped with all the Dr. Mario options that we’ve come to expect from this series. Although the price is a very low $5 and there are many games on the market that don’t offer the same amount of replayability as Dr. Mario that cost ten times the amount. If you have a Wii, the WiiWare version is definitely the way to go. If you have a DSi and crave puzzle games on your way to work, it’s a safe purchase.

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