Dr. Mario 64 is a charming update to the original formula. While the core gameplay of aligning pills to clear viruses remains the star, Dr. Mario 64 sprinkles in new modes and even a quirky story involving Mario and Wario. It's an easy game to pick up, but reaching mastery (especially on higher difficulties) is a rewarding challenge. However, some of the new modes feel underdeveloped, and the presentation can feel a touch dated for modern audiences. Still, it's a solid puzzle experience, especially if you're longing for the N64 era.

After years away from this game, I thought "oh, I've gotten significantly better at matchy puzzle games. This will allow Dr Mario to innovate by making it a Vs Puzzler, my favorite version of the puzzle! And I actually understand the cute Wario Land 3 theming! It'll be great!"

It is incredible that the game manages to be inferior to the original in almost every way - and I don't even care for classic Dr. Mario all that much! Every addition that the title makes outside of the vitamin drop preview is to its detrement. The Story Mode proves to be a rather agonizing slog, especially on higher difficulties where it increases the virus count in addition to the CPU difficulty, which merely prolongs games and highlights the massive issue the game has. The "garbage" system of the game, rewarding you by hindering your opponent when you do a cool combo, is to rain two randomly-colored pill parts on two random columns. However, as Dr. Mario is a methodical game of adaptation, this does not create a situation that pressures your opponent - it either has a chance of nothing happening or, more than likely, causing them to just have to work around it for a little bit. The issue being that every single time it plays a slooooow animation as garbage sloooowly rains from the sky, but not in a way that better pressures your opponent. It is incredibly difficult to eliminate yourself via clogging the play area in Dr. Mario, meaning that the end goal for both players is to simply prolong the match and waste the other player's time as much as possible, which is... really decidedly unfun and goes against the point of a lot of Vs-style showdowns. When it expands to four players - a requirement for the penultimate fight of Story Mode - sprites are squashed to an eye-straining degree and garbage allocation is dependent on the color of the pills that caused the combo... which is often too slow a process to be targeted, turning the entire affair to be heavily reliant on random spawns if you get to play the game at a remotely decent pace. Dr. Mario is an inherently alright puzzle game, but this adds surprisingly little and the main attraction is flawed in a way that's difficult to repair.

Rudy has surprisingly good music, though.

The most average version of a very average puzzle game. Many of the QoL features from other Tetris clones like instant-drop are not here. Not much is here, if we're being honest. The main campaign is short, but also I wasn't really begging for more. It does get challenging later on, but the cutscenes that tie each of the levels together are engaging enough to keep going. The multiplayer component handles fine.

If there's anything that warrants playing this game over other versions of Dr Mario, it would be the presentation. It really was released in 2001, and it looks and sounds like a late N64 title in a very positive way. I like the redesigns of the Mario cast and the music (outside of the main theme) was pleasant. The tie-ins to Wario Land 3 are cute. It's not that there isn't personality to the game,

The main issue the game has is it's just Dr. Mario. There's no modifiers or powerups to the game, and as a puzzle game it isn't as fast as Tetris or allows for as flashy of combos as something like Puyo Pop. It's just kinda boring until it gets really hard, and even then you have to care about getting good enough at Dr. Mario 64 to see Mario plot. Without something to spice things up, the game comes off as a whimper of a way to end Nintendo's involvement with the N64.

This game looks so innocent and plays like the most average Dr. Mario experience out there, but peeling the layers it just keeps getting more bizarre:

-95% of the cast are random Wario Land 3 enemies
-The division of Nintendo this was developed under is still unknown
-It wasn't released in Japan until two years later despite being entirely developed there, and on an entirely different platform
-Most of the artists that worked on this game were plucked from anime studios and never worked in the games industry ever again
-Nurse Peach appears in official art despite not even existing in the final game
-Octo was retroactively given blackface in later released Japanese version (not making this one up)