de tempos em tempos meu vício em puzzles tipo tetris acorda, e a vítima da vez foi o mario, que é surpreendentemente chato e não muito interessante, não ao menos pra te divertir por mais de 5 minutos.

a surpresa negativa não foi atoa, fui garantido que ia gostar, é tetris do mario afinal, como não ser bom? E na verdade ele é sim legal, sua dificuldade tem mais camadas do que o simples empilhar de blocos do tetris, as músicas são empolgantes, e tem o mario, mas isso dura até a primeira fase, porque repete a mesma música (as únicas duas), a dificuldade aumenta e o mario é muito feio no nes, ou seja, o jogo não se garante na repetição do gênero.

dr. mario é injusto consigo, uma ideia ótima mal executada, não o suficiente pra ser podre, só nao se sustenta. A aventura de expurgar vírus coloridos e maléficos do corpo de algum paciente com suas pílulas também coloridas e maléficas não brilhou no NES, infelizmente

In singleplayer, a decent puzzler, though one prone to screwing over the player on higher levels. The act and cadence of dropping pills and clearing viruses is fine enough, sort of fun to orient your brain around that level of pattern recognition. But the only real way difficulty scales is by increasing the amount of Viruses in the well (on top of the Doc throwing faster pills as the match goes on).

At higher difficulties, the viruses are so high that it feels like a player's ability to clear the well is based on where the Viruses happen to spawn. Hard to stay on good terms with a game that, 9 times out of 10, decides it's gonna give the player an unfavorable game board without anything they can do about it. I think the game is at its best around levels 10-15, where there are enough Viruses that the player has to think about it, but not so many that the above scenario happens.

Decent animation and quite good music, though. "Fever" is of course the enduring classic, but I actually find I like "Chill" better, at least in this original version. Something about hearing that driving groove match pace with the Viruses' dance adds a good deal to the experience.

idk why everyone keeps asking if I’m red-pilled or blue-pilled when yellow is clearly the superior of the three smh

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Dr Mario is a strange little game in the grand scheme of the Mario series; it’s both one of the first proper Mario spinoff series and a franchise that’s practically instantly recognisable to those in the general gaming space….while also being a game you rarely see people actually discuss outside of the occasional ‘yep that’s a Dr Mario game alright’ when you bring it up. However, after playing through some of the games on NSO again, I’ve gotten in the mood to chat about the one that started it all for a bit. So put on your lab coat and grab your (definitely legally obtained) PhD as we take a visit to the clinic of Mr. Mario himself.

The general conceit of Dr Mario is a decidedly simple one: you’re given a randomised layout of coloured viruses (red, blue and yellow) which you have to match with the colour of one of your pills. Match four of the same colour together and you clear a row; clear all the viruses and you beat the stage. It’s the same tried-and-true gameplay loop of many puzzle games from the 80’s/90’s (think Tetris, Puyo Puyo, etc.), albeit with a bit more of random element as the pills generated can be either entirely one colour or half one colour, half another. In much the same way the text on a doctor’s clipboard reads like complete gobbledygook on first inspection, the gameplay of DM sounds a hell of a lot more complicated than it actually is as, when you’re actually playing it, you start to fall into that classic sense of focused zen that competitive-minded puzzle games from this era manage to achieve so well. This is helped doubly by the excellent music which accompanies the action; from the infectiously catchy melody of Fever to the tense yet relaxed vibe of Chill, it does a great job at pushing you to hone your skills as the pills pile up in front of you.

Now while all this certainly sets DM apart from the crowd (even to this day), it does come with an unfortunate side effect that its contemporaries managed to evade: downtime. A frustratingly common occurrence in DM are situations where you’ll be down to about 1-2 viruses remaining where you just need one more colour to finish the stage off….only for the RNG to give you every colour but the one you need, resulting in you having to awkwardly push it to the side of the board and wasting far more time than is necessary. Dr Mario is also much more punishing than Tetris or Puyo Puyo in terms of making mistakes; while you can reasonably recover from a misplaced piece drop in the latter examples, an accidental colour placement in DM can pretty much doom a run from the moment it happens unless you’re REALLY deep into a stage, an issue that gets exacerbated to an obscene degree in some of the last stages where the viruses can spawn on the screen as high as the game will allow. The save states/rewind present in the modern VC/NSO releases can mitigate this issue somewhat but it’s still a massive pain regardless.

For a final diagnosis, Dr Mario is very much like real-life medicine: it can be exactly what you need if you’re feeling under the weather, but too much of it in a short time frame can just as easily make you feel even worse. Overall then, I’d prescribe a small dosage of the NES original every now and then for when you’re ‘sick’ of other puzzle games and want something just a little bit different.

Meu empenho era em fazer seek and destroy com os jogos que eu comprei e deixei parados. Não me obrigo a terminar nada, porque tento não ser neurótico, mas vou dando chance a jogo atrás de jogo, uma chance séria, uma chance com atenção e boa vontade, e vou também abandonando conforme o caso. Agora recentemente larguei a trilogia do Ace Attorney porque o humor não me pegou, larguei Grim Fandango e não sei dizer o motivo, parei com Bug Fables no finalzinho porque, entre outras coisas, meus joy-cons estão um lixo e eu não tô podendo jogar nada que demande extrema precisão e/ou combinações complexas de botões. Não preciso citar todos.

Nesse pique eu vinha bem até Dr. Mario pingar no pacote online do Switch e me deixar travado. Não sei dizer quantas horas eu torrei nisso aqui, mas me arrependo só um pouco. É como se ao mesmo tempo a gente tivesse claustrofobia e um impulso enorme para se prender num lugar fechado. É enervante pra cacete e satisfatório, também, ainda que em medida menor. Ele me fez lembrar que eu tenho um cerebrinho que, se fosse uma máquina, seria um tear do tempo em que a Inglaterra mandava no mundo. Ao mesmo tempo, no fluxo de separar as pilulaszinhas de acordo com os vírus que elas combatem, há um padrão que vai se insinuando pra esse cerebrinho cansado e que quase chega a formar alguma coisa semelhante a um entendimento, mas aí, claro, antes que o lé encontre o cré, as pílulas caem muito rápido e o cerebrinho não avança. É triste e perfeito.