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Mr. Driller

Score: 60%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Namco
Developer: Namco
Media: Cartridge/1
Players: 1
Genre: Action/ Puzzle

Graphics & Sound:

The graphics in Mr. Driller are nothing to write home about, but they’re certainly easy to understand. Bright and colorful, they are better than average fare for an action-puzzle game. Sure, there’s never more than a few sprites on the screen (the main one being Mr. Driller himself), but what’s there is nicely animated.

As for the sound, well, it’s a Game Boy. The tunes that were so sweet on the PlayStation sound merely tinny and mediocre on the speaker of the Game Boy Color. But they’re not so atrocious that you’ll be spinning the volume dial all the way down so that you don’t have to hear them. All in all, pretty standard fare for a Game Boy title.


Gameplay:

In Mr. Driller, you control a little man who’s trying to save the city of Downtown from a torrent of blocks in pastel colors coming from underground. Yeah, the plot makes no sense, but plots have never been strong points of puzzle games. The object of the game is to dig to a certain depth (or, in Survival Mode, to simply last as long as possible). You use your drill to burrow through the blocks. As you destroy blocks, the ones above may come crashing down on you. If they touch blocks of the same color, they glom together. But if four or more glom together, they all disappear and what’s above them starts to fall.

As if that wasn’t enough, you are constantly using up air as you play the game. There are air capsules that you can pick up, and they start off relatively easy to get -- zip in, pick ‘em up, and dodge out before the blocks overhead collapse. But as you dig deeper and deeper, they become more and more insidiously difficult to retrieve. It doesn’t help that the air consumption rate goes up the further down you go. I never realized that the inside of the Earth was airless, but hey, you learn something new every day.

And basically, that’s all there is to the game. You spend a lot of time drilling, dodging blocks, and picking up air capsules. It’s certainly entertaining, and I loved it on the big screen. But there’s something missing from this portable adaptation of the game. I can’t put my finger on it -- the lack of the funky music, the smaller number of gameplay options, the smaller screen all conspired to make what I originally found fun and addicting merely a chore.


Difficulty:

Mr. Driller isn’t the hardest game ever made, but since it originated as an arcade game, you’ll find that the 5,000 ft. mode is damnably difficult. It’ll take you quite a while to be able to beat the whole thing. And the Survival Mode itself is unbeatable; you dig until you die. I beat the 2,500 ft. mode on my second try, but that comes more from me playing a whole lot of the PlayStation version of Mr. Driller, and is not indicative of the Way Things Really Are.

Game Mechanics:

For what they’re worth, Mr. Driller’s controls are spot on. Use the D-pad to move around and the button to use your drill. It doesn’t get all that much simpler than that, really. The menus are spare, but certainly functional, and light-years away from the horrid things on the first-gen GB games.

Mr. Driller is by no means a bad game, but it just didn’t grab me the way that the PlayStation version did. That being said, any fan of the action-puzzle genre owes it to themselves to at least check the game out and see if it’s their style. It may not have infinite loads of replay value, but it certainly is a pleasant little ride while it lasts. The only question is how long it’ll last you.


-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications
AKA Phil Bordelon

GameBoy Color/Pocket The Smurfs’ Nightmare GameBoy Color/Pocket Disney’s Tarzan

 
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