Back in the days of the Nintendo, all of us were kind of blown away by this new system that was just so much better than anything we had seen before by a long shot. Atari, who had been screwing its userbase over for many years never stood a chance when the NES was released in the mid 80's. Everyone abandoned Atari at this point and they had a very good reason to do so.
The NES was everything in our world and there was a ton of games on it. The idea of having a mascot never really occurred to console makers back in those days and I don't think that Nintendo even knew that Mario was going to be the exceptional sensation that he was. It wasn't long before there were Mario games of all sorts and most of them were pretty fantastic. There was one that I really didn't like and don't really understand why other people did though, and that game was Dr. Mario.
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After the absolutely massive success of Tetris in 1989, it shouldn't be that surprising that Nintendo wanted to get in directly on the action by designing their own "action puzzle" game but it couldn't just be exactly the same thing as Tetris with a cartoon character, it had to be an entirely different concept. While Dr Mario certainly pulled that off, and people bought the absolute crap out of this game (it is the 7th best selling NES game of all time) I guess I just don't understand why anyone thought this was fun.
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This game was different from Tetris in the way that Tetris didn't ever really end until the blocks got up to the top of the screen whereas in Dr Mario there were levels that you completed by eliminating the virus blobs by aligning 4 of the same color of pill halves in a row to eliminate them. The levels got increasingly more difficult even though there was only 3 colors involved in the original game. As later levels were gotten to, the pills would feature fewer and fewer of the color combination that you actually needed in order to get rid of all the viruses (seriously, the plural of virus isn't "viri"?)
For some people I guess this was great fun but I was bored almost immediately, perhaps because I had played too much Tetris and puzzle games of this nature didn't really interest me a great deal anymore. It must have allured enough people, because although the sales in Japan of this game were rather lukewarm, the US markets gobbled up 2.5 million copies of the game in the first 6 weeks of release. It wasn't even a Xmas release date gimmick either.
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2-player games were OK I guess but again, I had done this so much with connected GameBoys that I think the novelty had kind of worn off on me.
Out of all of the top-10 selling games for the NES, I feel as though they were all pretty great. For some reason this one just bored me almost immediately. If you are a fan of this game all I can say is that i don't really relate to why anyone would think this was fun, even back in 1990 perhaps especially back in 1990 because at that point the Sega Genesis had been released for nearly a year and not many gamers I knew were even paying any attention to NES anymore.
If you like this game I would love to hear what it is about it that you found special because to me this just seemed like a "hey, Tetris made a bunch of money, why don't we throw Mario on the side and basically steal the concept and see if we can do it too!" type of thing.
It is also worth knowing that the Karens of the world protested this game because it depicted pills as if a game was going to encourage kids to start throwing pharmaceuticals around because of it.