Recently I purchased a copy of Dr.Mario for the GBA which is a port of the NES original. Growing up I had it, Yoshi (Yoshi and Mario) and Tetris on the Game Boy which rounded out my solid collection of puzzle games.

Anyway, I've been having as much fun with it as I had before, but looking the game up on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.mario) I thought of a glaring omission that really could/should be in the article. Finding sources to quote could be troublesome however.

I'm not sure if anyone else remembers, but Dr.Mario was actually a somewhat controversial title. It's hard imagining any Mario game being controversial, but the concept of "pills" (which are dubbed "vitamins" in the manual) put the game on the map with some parental groups. I even remember watching a program of Dateline where a representative of Nintendo was questioned about the game and the difference between "vitamins" and "pills" was once again stressed.

In today's world, the time wasted by some complaining about this game is simply laughable considering some of the games today and those that would debut even a few years later. Still, it's an important and very interesting chapter in the history of a classic game.

On the subject of the game, which version is your favorite? I have to go with the Game Boy version even when it comes to the audio; the extra notes in the tracks of the NES version came off very foreign to me.

The fact that the game was originally based around pieces of lettuce and was called Farmer Mario until a sponsorship deal with Pfizer* would say to me that the controversy was justified.

*May be a lie.

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=242

Haha, yeah. Still, when I think of blantant commercialism I think of Twisted Metal III and 4, which more or less whored itself out as an advertising vehicle for Rob Zombie. They even gave him his own vehicle in the fourth game for heaven's sake and used his Dragula video as his ending.

I'm guess I'm the sucker though, I kind of like the 4th game; the levels are sweet.