This Week in Defunct Games - October 5, 2012

What Is It? In the mind of somebody who believes Nintendo can do no wrong, Dr. Mario is one of the best puzzle games of all time. For years I have listened to people talk about how Dr. Mario is the second coming of Tetris. It's not. It's a middling puzzler that, despite receiving mostly negative reviews at the time, managed to captivate an audience looking for the next big puzzle game for the Game Boy. Don't be fooled again.

Dr. Mario plays a lot like the Puyo Puyo series, in that "colored" blocks fall from the sky and you have to match them together. Here Nintendo takes that idea one step further by adding an objective. The idea is to use your pills to eliminate the various viruses found on floating on the board. Destroy the illness and you move on to another level where you do exactly the same thing.

Players control how powerful the outbreak is and the speed of the pills, but the general objective quickly becomes tiresome. Tetris succeeded because you could use strategy to set up the perfect play, whereas this is merely about completing the goal and moving to the next stage. As a result, Dr. Mario feels like a job you have to complete.

Does It Still Hold Up? Fans of Tetris will feel right at home with this portable puzzler. The modes, button scheme and even presentation is surprisingly similar. Nintendo even manages to make the colorful pills work on a black and white handheld. Still, this is never as gripping as Tetris and other puzzle games of that era.

Is It Worth The Money? This Game Boy port marks the third (and hopefully final) way to play Dr. Mario on the Nintendo 3DS. Early adopters who are part of the Ambassador program already own a color version of Dr. Mario, thanks to the free Wario Ware download. If you're not somebody who has access to the Game Boy Advance titles, there's still the DSiWare release that is fully compatible with the 3DS. If you absolutely must own Dr. Mario, go with either of the other options. Or, better yet, reminds yourself that Dr. Mario isn't very good and you're better off buying a better Game Boy puzzler.