Year released: 1990 (NES)

Number of Players: 1-2 simultaneously

Mario takes on a new sickness with some pills he recently invented, resulting in Tetris-style puzzle gameplay.

Graphics: These graphics make good use of the NES. You get vibrant pill and virus colors (sky blue, yellow, and red), along with appropriate scenery. Slightly better than Tetris.

Play control: Pills fall from the top of the screen one at a time. Down on the control pad to make the one you control at that time fall faster, left and right to move it left and right, A button to make it move clockwise, B to make it move counter-clockwise. The pills are a bit small, so aiming them may be hard if you like to use down on the control pad.

Sound: Some instruments that come off refreshing--not the same ones you're always hearing on the NES. Like several other Mario-but-not games (the Super Mario RPGs, for example), the music is awesome in composition where main-stream Mario games have quaint (just pretend that "quaint" has a bad connotation, okay?) music. Sound effects are original too.

Challenge: Clear the viruses by matching up their colors with the colors of the pills you get. You almost never get THE perfect pill, thus challenge presents itself. Challenge also takes form when viruses begin to grow more numerous (as you move on to later levels), taking up precious room. Oh, yeah, if you hadn't guessed, hitting the top of the screen means game over.

Gameplay: You can gather what the gameplay is like from the above. By the way, in two player mode, you both race to clear all of the viruses. If you clear two lines of a color or different colors at once (done not only side by side, but you can drop halves of pills--you just have to play the game to get it), you drop one half of a pill for every line you cleared at that time (minimum being two).

Bottom line: I'm not completely sure, but I believe Dr. Mario started a sub-genre in the Tetris-style puzzle genre. That is, matching a certain amount of whatever color to clear out stuff. If you like Tetris, Tetris Attack, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, Pokemon Puzzle League (is that what it's called?) or any Tetris-style puzzle game, Dr. Mario is definetely worth checking out.

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