In your face! …uh, sorry.

By Stephen Munn | June 5, 2008

If you’ve ever played Dr. Mario with a live opponent, you know how tense the game can become. Generally speaking, I always get my ass handed to me by my wife, who is remarkably fast and precise while dropping capsules in the game. Somehow, she’s managed to retain her mad Dr. Mario skillz over many years of not playing the game since its heyday on the NES.

However, take a look at my decidedly low-tech screenshot, and you’ll see one of my very narrow wins. We’re talking winning by a pixel, folks. It looks like she’s already completed that line of yellow pieces to clear her last virus, but it seems she was just too slow.

I’ve yet to play the game online, but it’s this kind of experience that makes it probable I will never spend any significant amount of time doing so. There’s no voice or text chat in the game, so you might as well be playing against a CPU character with a random Mii. Without that interaction… without the smack talk, the game can’t possibly be this good.

All in all, get the game and play it local. It’s worth all thousand points.