David Perry Challenge #002 - Dr. Mario

Dr. Mario is a puzzle game created by Nintendo in 1990. The game has you lining up pills of 3 different shades to clear viruses on the puzzle board. It's a very simple premise that ramps up the difficulty as the game goes on. Few puzzle games manage to create a perfectly straight difficulty curve as the game goes on. Dr. Mario does.

The primary resource in the game is the pills which Mario throws onto the board. Each pill has two halves, and each half is black, gray, or white. On the NES the colors are Red, Blue, and Yellow, probably one of the earliest examples of colorblind-friendly gameplay. This means each pill can be one or two colors, with six total variations. The game avoids falling into the tropes of Tetris or Match-3 by adjusting how the game is scored. Instead of awarding the player for just making matches with pills, players are only rewarded for making matches of four or greater that include the viruses scattered throughout the board, each of which is also black, gray, or white and the size of half a pill. When all viruses on the board have been cleared, the levels progress, and four more viruses are added to the board. While this does double the number of viruses on the board from the first level to the second, after that it actually becomes a smaller percentage increase per level (50%, 25%, 12.5%, etc.). This may seem like diminishing returns on the difficulty, but it gives the game value for your time spent playing and the board does start filling up pretty quickly. It allows the game to be elongated while never feeling like the player's time is just being milked.

The original Dr. Mario on NES is an early example of colorblind friendly gameplay.

To mix things up, there are also three speeds at which you can play the game (Slow, Medium, and Fast), two different songs to listen to while playing, and you can start at any level, from 0-12. However, starting at a higher level will not give you a higher score by default, so the challenge becomes a matter of survival instead of high score. Starting at a higher level is a great way to train for marathon sessions of the game, to help you get used to the higher pressure of a board that is nearly completely filled with viruses.

What makes Dr. Mario so much fun is its simplicity. All of its systems are on the surface, clear as day to the player. There is no back-end trickery, no subtle balance adjustments if you're doing too well (or too poorly), and no random powerups that throw the game for a loop. It's an old enough game too that your high score isn't even saved (on the Game Boy at least), so it's up to you to want to improve, not an online leaderboard laughing at your pathetic attempts to reach the Top 10.

In case you thought I only emulated it, here's proof of having the real thing!

There have in fact been many Dr. Mario games released, the most recent of which being Dr. Mario Express on the DSi. Yet, none of the future Dr. Mario titles have messed with the formula. Why fix what ain't broke? There have been some minor tweaks, though. For example, in the original Dr. Mario you would only see the next pill before it came onto the board. In the DSi and Wii versions, you see the next three. Dr. Mario on the Wii also had online play, a welcome (and rare) addition for any Nintendo game.

Dr. Mario on Wii features competitive online play for the first time in Dr. Mario's history.

Nowadays, with the introduction of microtransactions and online-gated gameplay (i.e. blocking out the player from enjoying the game if they are not connected to the internet for purposes of preventing piracy), I fear that a lot of the magic of Dr. Mario could be easily lost. Imagine if you dropped a dollar on the game and all of a sudden your next ten pills were “wild cards” that would make matches no matter where they went. Where would the challenge be in that? What about the fun? What I love so much about Dr. Mario is that it reminds me of a time when games were games, when developers weren't afraid to teach you all there is to know about a game in the first 30 seconds and that little bit created an infinite amount of replayability. If developers nowadays care about the gameplay, and not just about milking their players for all their money, they should take a serious look at Dr. Mario and revel in its simplicity. They should take note of how the formula for the gameplay hasn't changed in over twenty years, and yet it and its followups are amazing. That is truly saying something, and Dr. Mario is a truly great game.