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.

Marking as 'finished' since I beat Top Jockeys for the first time after about 30 hours. Pocket Card Jockey is just flat-out great game looping. There's a good amount of variance & randomness to prevent it from getting too monotonous, although I think the difficulty curve is tuned just sliiightly too high for the amount of randomness – no clue how much, if any, balancing they adjusted from the original 3DS version but it doesn't feel like they changed much there. Foals also feel a little irrelevant compared to several premades that Just Work at an equal level to some of my best foals, though I'm not sure how much my foals will start to get juiced up after breeding some from my Top Jockeys winner, could be significant. All in all, very unchanged from the 3DS version (except for the fantastic new 3d graphics) and that's a great thing. Razor-sharp localization, too – just one of the most raw fun games I've ever played.