Review written by Jason Surguine

Buy Dr. Pocket from Clickgamer

Dr. Pocket is based on the old NES puzzle game, Dr. Mario. If you don't know what an NES is or what a Mario is. You can go ahead and look it up on Google. I'll wait.

Okay, it's the same exact game as the original but on the PPC and without the franchise. You have little coloured viruses stuck in your screen (which is shaped like a bottle) and you need to eliminate them by dropping three of the same colours either horizontally or vertically next to them. You do that by the little multi-coloured pills that dropped from the top of the screen (a la Tetris). Sounds simple, right?

That's where the difficulty comes in. Those stupid little pills take up two spaces, while the viruses take up 1. And the pills, like I mentioned, are multicoloured; meaning you have excess colours hanging around after you've destroyed some viruses. Which gets very difficult, and very frustrating, and somehow ...addicting.

As far as game play goes, I'll start by saying that Dr. Pocket is very true to the original in frustration and difficulty level. The original game wasn't that good, and even at the time of its release in 1990 was mainly spoken of as an average Tetris knockoff.

The marathon mode can be fun, but you feel like you are constantly battling just to barely survive the entire game. Because, no matter how well you're doing, the viruses will continue to multiply.

In my opinion, the timed play mode is where the game is actually really playable. You have a set number of viruses to get rid of in a set amount of time, which is very doable... until around level 10. Then the game is really based upon the luck of whatever coloured pill you get out. In fact, a large amount of this game is based upon luck of that coloured pill rather than your skilful manipulation of it. And one major gripe with the timed game is that the timer continues to count down while I'm waiting for the game to drop the excess pill colours to the bottom.. you'll see what I mean if you play it.

Next we'll move to the graphics and presentation. The presentation is perfect, no visible flaws, not graphical glitches, and no frame rate issues. As for the graphics, they're decent. They're not bad. Menus are clean and neat. The in game graphics are clean and neat. The little viruses munch their neat little mouths together. And the title screen has a neat little logo. And you get the overall impression of clean and neat.. and bland and boring. Nothing exceptional here. Although it should be noted that it appears that you can change the background skins for the in game graphics using jpgs... Interesting.

A category where this game does outshine it's predecessor is sound. The music and sound in the original were awful for their time, not to mention it was 8-bit junkie sound. Dr. Pocket features minimal, but good sound effects during the game. However, make sure you adjust the volume of the sfx way down, as it comes pretty unbalanced out of the box. As for the music, the first track, 'Ice', is top notch, and catchy, bouncy puzzle game music; track two 'Fire' is a well done song, way to slow and reserved for me, but some like soothing music during puzzle games (remember song B in Tetris? ;)), and Track 3, 'Wind', just sounds like its broken, seriously. But that's fine because I really like the Ice track.

Play control is such a tough thing to measure on a PPC; because of all the different manufacturers have a unique design. I played Dr. Pocket on my Ipaq 1910. The 1910 has a pretty nice d-pad on it, with a rarely used button, awkwardly placed in the centre of it; which definitely shouldn't be used for games in conjunction with the d-pad. Yet, Dr. Pocket has this very button for rotating the pills clockwise, which is a huge pain when trying to play this game. If I could have configured the game to use whichever buttons I wanted; it would have been fine, and I wouldn't have this blister on my thumb.

Another thing, which would help this game a lot, would be an onscreen pad for control with a stylus. The control in the game is simple enough; it wouldn't be hard to do. Something refreshing about navigating the menu screens was that you have to use the d-pad and the buttons. Confused the heck out of me at first, but once I figured it out, it was really quite genius. It makes the game feel like an actual console game. If you don't figure that out, or if you don't like controlling with the d-pad and buttons (and prefer all stylus) it can get very annoying.

A review all comes down to one thing though doesn't it? Especially for those of you who just scrolled down to the last paragraph to get the summary :) Is the game fun? Well, yes, the game is fun at times. Then at other times, you'll be swearing at the top of your lungs out of frustration. I did. Even more so than normal. Yet somehow, that frustration can be addicting at times. I found myself yelling that I hate the game.. and then playing it for another 60 minutes trying to beat it. With a concept that is true to the original, a decent graphical presentation, and good sound track, the game is a good if you're a fan of the original, or just a hard core fan of the puzzle genre. However, if you have a problem with anger management (or live in an apartment with thin walls), this game is not the game for you.

Pros:

• Neat Presentation
• Good Sound and Music
• ....Strangely Addictive Game play

Cons:

• Drab Graphics
• Frustrating Game play
• No configurable controls

Overall Score: 7/10

Many thanks to Pocket Adventures for providing us with our review copy.

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