You know, there’s really not a whole lot to say about Dr. Mario except for the following:
1.) Most Addictive Puzzle Game Ever (okay, okay, maaaaybe second to Tetris Attack),
and 2.) Catchiest Music Ever. Ever.
P.S.: Cannot be unheard:
I? am Dr. Mario and I am saving lives
I look different in this game (I lost my hat, got a coat, doctor light, stethoscope)
I am Dr. Mario and I prescribe high fives
Laughter’s the best medicine so BWA HA HA HA! You fell down!
In the Mushroom Kingdom I’m the finest doc by far
I got my degree by watching House and Scrubs and E.R.
Brightly colored pills
They’ll cure all your ills
Just as long as you’ve got fever or the chills
(Yeah, this is a day late. Sorreh. Was having site issues most of yesterday and then had to work all day. Anyways, let’s cut to the chase:)
You’d think that a repetitive game with even more repetitive music (the Ghostbusters theme song on loop) wouldn’t be very exciting, but then, you’ve probably never played Ghostbusters.
And honestly, if you’ve never heard the theme song belted out in glorious SID, then you’re missing out on some Serious Awesomeality. (Awesomeality is now a word.)
And you gotta admit: getting those voices to come out of a Commodore 64 is impressive.
So let’s talk about the gameplay. You start out by building your own ghostbusting car pretty much from scratch– if you’ve beaten the game enough times you have enough virtual dough to get shinier cars, giving this game a very early form of replay value– and then you are plunked onto a map of the city:
Where your new goal is to drive around to the blinking buildings and trap ghosts. (Don’t cross the streams!) Every so often your ghost traps fill up and you have to go back to Headquarters to clear ’em out, but other than that… it’s blinking buildings for you, buddy.
This is basically how the game goes for quite some time. It starts out fairly tame, but gets more difficult as time goes on and you have to juggle more and more blinking buildings. Things REALLY get exciting when the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man decides to stomp all over everything. He can be stopped if you’re really quick– like, “jam the correct key on your keyboard within a half second when you realize what’s going on” quick– and this is enough to set you on MASSIVE TWITCH MODE for the entire second half of the game because the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man could show up ANY SECOND NOW.
And you don't want that.
The game gets more and more fastpaced and frenzied as a key and lock start chasing each other around the map. Eventually they get to Zuul, and you have to run your guys to safety underneath the bouncing Marshmallow Man. Have fun with this, because the hit detection is basically random and if you don’t get at least two of three guys through then you go directly to Game Over, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
So there you are as a kid, minding your own business at the video rental place, and hey look, a new Mario game to rent! Awesome, right?
Yeah, until you bring it home and realize that this game is… well, let’s just say it’s not your average Mario game. For starters, you play as Luigi. Which is fine and all, except that the entire premise of the game is to travel around random real-world cities, collect vaguely-historical items, and take them to Princess Peach (I called her the “I Lady” as a kid because she sat in a booth that had a big letter “I” on it) so she could quiz you on… I dunno, educational stuff.
Now, I have nothing wrong with educational games. I think they can be very effective ways to get people to learn. Here’s the thing though; I don’t think I learned anything from this game, except that it was pretty dumb. I mean, if you’re gonna be an educational game, at least have rivers to ford or numbers to munch. You know?
Actually I was a dirty traitor who liked Word Munchers better.
Anyways, my only memory of “Mario is Missing” is that it was a disappointing game that involved talking to the “I Lady” a disproportionate number of times. If it taught me anything, I certainly don’t remember it.
Fortunately we can all be comforted by the fact that Nintendo had nothing to do with this game; it was made by an outside company. And we all know what sort of things happen when outside companies have fun with Nintendo characters:
Yup.
P.S. Turns out there was a sequel-of-sorts to this game, called “Mario’s Time Machine”. Creepy Bowser/Ganon Hybrid is disappoint:
We’re getting to that point where most of the games I have yet to cover fall somewhere on my “Top Favorites” list. I haven’t talked about most of them since I fear I won’t be able to do them justice. But since I can’t put them off forever, have one of my faves.
See, of all the traditional platforming Mario games (aka, not Kart/RPG/etc.) … this has always been my favorite:
Maybe it’s the solid gameplay. Or the catchy music. Or the quirky design. Or all of the above. All I know is that sometimes, when I have 20 or 30 minutes to kill and nothing else to do, I can pull out SMB3 and play through the first world for the millionth time and enjoy every freaking second of it.
Come on, guys. You KNOW this music makes you happy.
There were a ton of secrets in this game– getting “behind” the trees and bushes for one, or those warp whistles that would take you to far off levels. I knew and played around with all the secrets, but one day I sat down, determined to play through the whole thing from start to finish without the whistle.
…I got to about halfway through world seven and couldn’t get any farther. Curse you freaking pipe maze!
Still, seven of eight isn’t bad, and eight is pretty near impossible anyway from what I’ve played by using the whistles, so it’s not like I ever would’ve beaten it anyway.
Man. Thinking about that Pipe World still makes me shudder a bit.
Really, though, have you ever just sat down and thought about the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s filled with flying turtles, pipes with plants that shoot fire at you, airships, raccoon suits that make you fly, and shoes that you can bounce around in.
…
I want to live there.
I hope it’s the SMB 3 version.
P.S. – WHO REMEMBERS THE MCDONALDS HAPPY MEAL TOYS??
Because I seriously had all of them. The Goomba didn’t work very well, though.
Remember back in the day when the original Pokémon was the biggest deal in the world? You know what the first non-Game-Boy Pokémon game was? That’s right. Pokémon Freaking Snap.
Everybody was stoked over this game. I mean really, this was a huge deal for us oldschool Poké-freaks who lived in a bizarre world filled with rumors of Mew being under the truck by the S.S. Anne or the Celadon Dept. store thirsty girl giving you a “Pikablu” if you gave her enough drinks. Pokémon Snap was a dream fulfilled. Finally we got to see Pokémon in those glorious, blocky, N64 polygons.
The premise of the game is pretty simple: Go around and take pictures of Pokémon. You get points based on the pictures you take. Then you can sort the pictures into albums and stuff. I know it sounds like some sort of Flash or Facebook game gone wrong or something, but somehow the game managed to be fiendishly addicting.
Also, hitting Mew in the head with an apple over and over again in the last level was hilarious. Especially because it would go “Me-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eew” as you did so.
…actually, though, there is one reason in particular why this is today’s Classic Video Game Monday. That reason is the Poké Flute song that can be heard here from about 0:16 to 0:31:
I have hummed and whistled this tune all the freaking time ever since this game came out eleven years ago.
Lode Runner is one of those games that should probably be more well known than it is. Not to say the game isn’t already pretty well-known, but, you know, in my opinion there should be a chicken in every pot and a Lode Runner in every household.
This oldschool favorite (I played it on the Commodore 64) worked as follows: You, as an adventurous young stick figure, climb up ladders and monkey-bar your way across polls to collect little cubes on the ground, while trying to avoid a bunch of other stick figures who for some reason are out to get you. Also, I guess they’re robots are something.
Fortunately for you, you have a shovel, and you can dig holes into the ground behind you, which your enemies will fall into. This is relatively humane when you do it from higher platforms, but if you do it while on ground level they’ll wind up buried alive.
…fortunately for them, they respawn. Hmm. I suddenly wonder about the ethics of killing someone in a world where you respawn a minute later. There should be a video game philosophy class somewhere.
Also, this song is now stuck in your head.
Anyways, this whole deceptively simple premise is the fuel behind a remarkably addictive puzzle game with probably about a hundred levels, plus a level editor, which was a pretty radical idea at the time. I remember my dad loved this game and got really far. To level 64 or something, which was unheard of for Baby Pike, who plinked around at level nine.
This game spawned a sequel that I also played, called Lode Runner’s Rescue, which had exactly one thing in common with the original game and that one thing was the name “Lode Runner” in the title. Still, for having nothing whatsoever to do with the original, that game was also pretty dang fun. Too bad I can’t find anything about it on Google, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.
Lode Runner is still around– I’ve seen clones of it in the Ubuntu repositories and remakes pop up on various platforms every so often. (Heehee, platforms. I see what I did there.)
But the best praise for it? Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov called it his favorite puzzle game. You can’t get much more legit than that.
One of Nintendo’s Really Good Decisions was the decision to launch the Super Smash Brothers franchise.
A fighter that doesn’t take itself seriously… pretty much at all, while still providing silly amounts of replay value and being a game that pretty much anyone can pick up and play. Yes, folks, this is a win.
I think what initially won me over was the hammer. See, I grew up playing the original Donkey Kong. The original Donkey Kong includes a hammer, which kills everything, as it plays this little ditty. I had aaaaaaaalmost forgotten about this hammer, and it itself had aaaaaaaalmost faded into obscurity, when Super Smash Bros. came out. And they had a hammer. I sort of died little bit from the sheer levels of Awesome and Win.
You know what other item was great?
The freakin’ BASEBALL BAT.
Because if you time it juuust right, it’s a one-hit KO. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing that sparkle on your bat as time seems to slow down riiiight before it happens…
…
And that noise. CRACK.
It’s the most satisfying noise in the world.
I can’t find any good vids on YouTube but YOU KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.
So, anyway. Pikachu was my favorite character, because come on, it’s freaking Pikachu. We all know what happens when Pikachu gets serious:
I got pretty good with him. I mean, I was never one of those super-die-hard SSB players, but I could hold my own. One time for a school project I went to some other student’s house and we played SSB for a little while. The other kids (well, we were college age, but you know) tried to talk me into playing and at first I refused, cause it had been a while and I was rusty, but finally I relented and grabbed a controller and bust out Pikachu. I won. It was glorious.
Actual photo of Pike playing Smash Bros. Note the goggles.
Ahh, good times.
Really though, classic game right here. I never really got into the successors, though that’s mostly due to lack of time more than anything. (Oh, and not owning a Wii kind of complicates things.) But yeah. One of the better things Nintendo has ever done? Undoubtedly.
I know what you’re thinking. “Mickey Mouse? Really, Pike? Really?”
Yes, really. This is Capcom platforming at its best. Basically they took a Mega Man game and replaced Mega Man with Mickey Mouse. It sounds lame, but the awesome gameplay is still there, regardless of whether your character is a robot or a rodent.
You play as the Mouse himself as you travel through various worlds to find and rescue Pluto. Yes, your ubiquitous Fire World and Ice World are here, but there’s also a climbing-mountain world and a magical forest world that I found to be unique and memorable. That magical forest world had great music, too:
True to form with Capcom, you get to don a variety of outfits that change your fighting style… in this case, you can have a Wizard suit, a Firefighter suit, or a Climbing outfit. Of these three, the climbing outfit is the most gimmicky, but the other two are great (albeit fairly similar to each other). You can change the outfits whenever you want, including mid-fight… it’s kind of like Fisher-Price’s My First Mega Man.
Combine this with solid controls, hidden item shops where you can buy upgrades, and giant rolling tomatoes, and you’ve got a winner, Disney license or not.
So yeah. At first glance you might think this game has “Generic kiddie platformer” written all over it but really, it’s solid and comes with some great things that make it unique. When Nintendo Power released its first list of “100 Greatest Nintendo Games” back in 1998 or whenever that was, this game was on the list. You know, alongside stuff like Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64. Just sayin’.
P.S. yes, I have this game on Game Boy Advance. The final boss is hard.
In this game, you play a guy with a helicopter jetpack, some dynamite, and laser vision.
Sounds awesome, no?
Yeah. It was.
This game gives you dozens of levels, which throw more and more obstacles in your way as you go on. Obstacles include: walls, which must be destroyed with your limited supply of dynamite, the lava-coated version of the same walls (which kill you), Evil Light Bulbs which turn off if you go the wrong way, reducing your visibility to zero, and a variety of animals like spiders, bats, moths, and snakes, all of which will also kill you if you don’t laser-vision them. (This game single-handedly justifies my irrational fear of moths, by the way.)
Then at the end of each level a guy tallies up your remaining time and dynamite and gives you points based on what you have left. At this point you’d be sent to the next level. As you progressed through the levels, the game would start sending more obstacles and various alternate paths at you, making what started as a simple game rather difficult after all.
One of my favorite parts of the game is the sound. There’s no music for this game, but between the copter-pack and the bombs there are a variety of fun sound effects which I will still launch into imitating without warning.
Choka-choka-choka…
chick… POOM
choka-choka-choka
choka-choka-choka
peeeew
tcccchhhhhheeeeewwwwwwww
POOM POOM POOM POOM POOM
Seriously that’s the first level. Check it out:
See, you can’t deny my sound effects aren’t accurate. You can’t deny it. You should hear me IRL.
Now, when I think of this game, I invariably think of my mom. See, I come from a big gaming family. I was playing online games back before most people had a computer– we’d play them over the modem. Anyways, it was mostly my dad and uncle who would do the gaming every Sunday, but I guess one day my mom wanted something to prove so she sat down and memorized basically this whole entire game, twisty pathways and all. She owned everyone at this game. Nobody could beat her. It was ridiculous.
I can’t remember how far I got personally. Maybe level 12 or so. (This game got difficult.)
Regardless, this game was a blast. It was such a simple concept: fly around, shoot stuff, and blow things up, but they managed to add some sort of level of strategy to it and enough levels that would get juuuust harder enough to keep you playing for a really long time.
Once upon a time Japan had a quirky but addictive little puzzle game named Panel de Pon. Nintendo took it, rebranded it so it was about Yoshi and pals, and released it as Tetris Attack, and life was suddenly a lot more awesome.
Tetris Attack operates on the simple idea of lining up similarly colored blocks either vertically or horizontally to make them disappear. Three in a row works, but you can do four or five for extra points. This sounds simple enough, and even a tad underwhelming, but where things really start to get exciting is with the chain reactions you can cause to build combos and score obscene amounts of points, and completely screw over your opponent if you’re playing multiplayer. Like such:
This simple little idea was stupidly addictive and the number of hours I spent playing this game is probably close to the hundreds. In fact, I even owned a Game Boy version of this game– not nearly as good, but you know, puzzle games are ultimately meant for long road trips, and this game was no exception.
The cute characters were a bonus and the catchy music was an even bigger one. All you need to do is hear all of Blargg’s Theme to become a believer in this case. I actually wrote lyrics to this song when I was 14 or 15 years old, because I am a dork. No, you don’t get to see them. Also, the credits theme is possibly the most relaxing thing you will ever hear in an SNES game.
Nintendo later replaced Yoshi with Pikachu and re-released this game for Nintendo 64 as Pokemon Puzzle League– the name change, perhaps, was because they realized that this game had absolutely nothing to do with the original Tetris. (And, you know, to get people to buy it, because this was at the height of the Pokemon Craze.) I prefer the Yoshi version, myself, although Pokemon Puzzle League did include a pretty ingenious “3D mode” where you spun your puzzle around a cylinder.
Anyways, regardless of how you play the core game, you should. I’d do pretty much anything to have this game on my cell phone. Seriously, Nintendo. Tetris Attack. Cell phone. Kay?
See, I’m not kidding about the credits theme. Don’t listen to this if you don’t want to fall into a blissful sleep. Just a warning.
