Cómo transformar diversión en trabajo a través de presunto buen diseño. Convertir cada obstáculo y mecánica y nivel en una sucesión de ejercicios a aplicar. Todo en incrementos, progresivamente. Que se note lo concienzudo detrás de cada acción que realizamos, que se vea la mano de los diseñadores. Y pulido, que nada quede fuera de sitio. Then rinse and repeat.

Uno de los videojuegos más útiles como ejemplo de la diferencia entre lo considerado buen diseño y lo que realmente lo es. Una lástima, me encantaría ver este mismo taladro en un buen videojuego. Qué desperdicio.

A lot of people direct a ton of malice towards Game Freak, mostly due to the more recent Pokemon games. Hell, for the most part, people only recognize Game Freak as "the creators of Pokemon". This kind of mentality doesn't really do their studio justice, seeing as Game Freak has created a decent amount of non-Pokemon titles in their time, games that are typically founts of creativity. In my opinion, Drill Dozer is one of their best.

You play as Jill Dozer, a young girl running around in a robot called a Drill Dozer. She's part of a family of thieves whose greatest treasure, the red diamond, has been stolen by a more nefarious gang of thieves. It's your job to go wreak some havoc and make them wish they never crossed you.

Before I go any further, I just wanna recommend you play this game with some form of rumble. It genuinely adds to the experience. The game cartridge has some meaty rumble built into the cartridge, but that can cost a pretty penny. The Wii U Virtual Console release of this game supports rumble as well, surprisingly enough. If you don't own a Wii U (understandable), then the emulator mGBA also supports the rumble feature. Just...play the game with rumble, trust me on this.

Drill Dozer is an action-platformer with a heavy emphasis on the L/R buttons. R spins your drill clockwise, L spins it counter-clockwise. It's a simple concept that's put to extensive use with a steady stream of level gimmicks and setpieces across the game's stages. Every level introduces a unique new way to use your drill, and a new boss fight that puts your skills to the test in a unique way. The game is a bit on the short side, but it makes up for it with extra areas to explore once you upgrade your drill, featuring more challenging stages, and hidden treasures to discover.

The presentation of this game is extremely solid. All the character designs are colorful and memorable, and the sprite work for the levels and backgrounds follow suit. Heck, the game came with a prologue comic book that you can read here. The music is excellent, using the GBA Pokemon games' soundfont to create one hell of a soundtrack. It's all wrapped up in a story with dialogue and events that feel akin to a Saturday morning cartoon, and it's a very enjoyable package overall.

Drill Dozer represents a lot of things to me, but most of all, it represents the need to let devs flex their creative muscles. Having a team make the same thing over and over can burn them out fast, but on the other hand, giving them a chance to create something wholly unique can bring something excellent into the world.

Kudos to Ken Sugimori, Go Ichinose, Junichi Masuda, Hironobu Yoshida, and all the other people working at Game Freak. Don't let all that creativity get snuffed out by Pokemon overdose.

The actual best Game Freak game, and it might not even be close.

Drill Dozer is such a creative and interesting game. The goal is to tear through lairs of enemies while regaining your lost treasure with your trusty lil drill mech, pressing R to spin clockwise and L to spin counter-clockwise. There's a lot to unpack from all the levels due to just how well the levels force you to utilize and understand the mechanics of the drill and its various interactions. Unlike most Game Freak games, Drill Dozer is also more than happy to test you, through both knowledge of game mechanics and tight execution. Yet it's also fairly forgiving thanks to Energy Tank upgrades you can purchase inbetween levels and quick and simple restarts after failure states. I really can't overstate how great this game feels to play either; make sure to play with rumble, because there's nothing like feeling the quaking as you drill your opponents into oblivion.

I blew through the game in about 6 hours or so after messing around with it the night prior and losing my mind over how ridiculously fun it was. It's short and sweet, and there's tons of post game content through challenge maps and drill upgrades should you wish to test yourself and venture further. With colorful spritework, well animated and static characters, and phenomenal level design, this is a true gem left collecting dust in Nintendo's 2000s catalogue. Yet another example why I consider the 2000s to be my favorite era of gaming, and Nintendo was at its creative prime.

The first three worlds are extremely easy to the point where I was referring to this game as "literally for toddlers." The last three worlds shift between "literally for toddlers" and "annoying trial-and-error." The moment to moment platforming is nothing special. The best part of the game is getting 3rd Gear because holding the button and hitting guys actually feels satisfying. Getting 3rd Gear is also the worst because you usually have it for so long that you get to used to it, and then it resets you back to 1st Gear every level. It's a neat idea to have the same kind of progression every level, but ultimately I didn't feel that it added much. There was maybe one time any exploration ended in me going "Oh, I need to go back and find 2nd/3rd Gear because I can't progress." If there was more of that, maybe the game would've been more fun. It also does that platforming thing where some bosses are fought in completely different ways than you'd be used to from playing the game for hours prior. One of them is a maze that you navigate by flying, which is kinda cool, but the flying controls just aren't very good. The fish boss was fine, but it suffered from being way too simple (like the entire game up to that point). Overall, it's just not a super enjoyable game and I don't think you should pick it up if you're not really curious what that one assist trophy in Brawl is about.

Cutesy GBA-platformer with a new and interesting gameplay mechanic? On paper this should be something I would be all over, but in the end it just somehow didn't manage to hold up as much as I initially thought. It's fun to play through, the drilling mechanics are comfortable and fun to solve puzzles with and the platforming action feels smooth and mostly uninterrupted, but after the first couple of levels, I just didn't feel like this game has enough to pull me in. There wasn't really anything to keep me engaged further in the game, especially with every level stripping away the gear upgrades and making you start collecting those again. This is perfectly fine way to keep each level as a separate adventure, but that felt just an unnecessary chore having to do the same thing over and over again.

The story isn't really anything new or great, the normal fetch quest type of deal having you collect six diamonds and beating the big bad evil guy, some of the bosses were a blast and some even managed to be challenging, but others just fade without having any real impact. I don't regret playing through it, it's a pretty decent game for a handheld system to set down and return to beat little bit every now and then.