Dr. Mario

Every aspect of this game has been optimized to instill obsession in the gamer. There are 20 standard levels, but you can go past that, into an infinite amount of levels, guaranteeing that no matter how good you are, you will eventually lose. The two-player game is a true classic. Clearing pills and viruses in a chain reaction fucks over the other player, raining pieces of pills down on his jar. Even the music, "Chill" in particular, is designed to get stuck in your brain forever. And the game is only enhanced by drunkenness.

This game is more addicting than the painkillers Dr. Mario prescribes for Princess Toadstool under the table.

Note: This game is not recommended for the color blind.

Nintendo owns U.S. Patent 5,265,888 on this Tetris-like puzzle game, but that didn't stop me from illegally cloning it for the PC at http://pineight.8m.com/drm.htm as part of freepuzzlearena.

It started on the NES and was ported to VS Unisystem, Game Boy, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 (the N64 version didn't turn out so well; see the review). Here's how it works: Viruses are floating inside a bottle. Two-sided vitamin capsules fall slowly from the top of the bottle. Use the joystick to move and rotate the capsules so that four items (viruses or capsule halves) of the same color are contiguous in a row or column. With skillful play, you can set it up so that capsule halves created after a combination create new four-in-a-row combinations. There's also an addictive deathmatch mode, where you can use such chain reactions to attack your opponent.

P.S. My clone ("Vitamins") is themable; a color-blind user (one who cannot tell red from green because of a cheap display or color vision deficiency) could go into the GIMP and create a theme giving the viruses distinct shapes.

Dr Mario - the game that will get your mum hooked - mine did

What you probably already know is that Dr. Mario is a tetris -like game that involves killing viruses by dropping pills on the viruses that match the colour of the virus. In order to actually kill the virus you have to make a line of four either vertically or horizontally. It's got cool music that for some reason you never get tired of.

The only weird thing to note is that although the game lets you go to level twenty from the menu screen, you can pass twenty, and indeed twenty one, twenty two and twenty three. But you will never pass twenty four because of the evil trolls. Actually no, when if you pass twenty four you pass to level...twenty four. Don't ask me why.

Also, passing levels that are a multiple of 5 (5, 10, 15, 20) in medium or high speeds will give you a little bonus animation with some twinkly music and some sort of animal/creature (from memory there's a turtle, witch, flying book, flying pig and UFO) flying over the three types of virus sitting on the tree.