I don't own a Wii so I haven't played it in person, but apparently the game contains some familiar features such as hard drop (up hard-drops with lock while down soft-drops without lock), TLS (ghost piece), and multiple previews in multiplay (3 in multiplayer, 1 in singleplayer). Suddenly I'm a lot more interested.
I guess I wasn't far off I think Dr. Mario 64 had TLS, and it screwed me up the same way it did when I first played TNT. When I first added small pieces to Lockjaw, I asked about how their kicks should be handled. People suggested copying the domino behavior from Dr. Mario (which is described on the wiki). So if this implements the same kicks as previous Dr. Mario products, then I guess it's official: ARS dominoes rotate like Dr. Mario pills. This would be Arika's first game for Wii (NTSC U/C), even if its first product was Endless Ocean.
Wow. That sure came out of the left field. I was gonna buy this anyway because, you know, I like Dr Mario. But if it's developed by my favorite puzzle company - all the better.
After watching videos, it actually doesn't look like much of a step up over Dr. Mario 64. The only really significant change is the addition of more previews. As much as I love Arika, I don't see much exciting here... It's not really improving on any of Dr. Mario's weak points.
This video says it supports Wai-Hwai Connection (whatever that is), which should be good for people who can consistently beat the highest CPU opponent. The other big feature is the Wii Remote counterpart to Tetris DS's touch mode. And Arika is known for making "improvements" to games. Anything in this game that doesn't "feel like TGM", such as long cascade delay, can probably be attributed to some "Dr. Mario Guideline" maintained by Nintendo.
I don't like the look of VS play too much. It basically just seems to be a time-attack against each other. I'd rather that your gameplay had some effect to your opponent's field.
The problem with Dr. Mario VS is that attacking your opponent means forcing them to wait through a very long animation. Unless you've seen videos of good players, they likely weren't playing very aggressively. Unfortunately waiting through several-second long animations makes for somewhat boring competitive play.
Yeah, I barely even noticed that the things were being sent. I think it's just because I'm used to VS modes like those in Tetris, where the objective is to kill your opponent rather than just basically play your own game.
Probably history 6 rolls. I mean, seriously... TGM 2, TAP, 3, ACE, Jewelry Master have history 6 rolls TGM 1 has history 4 rolls Don't all Arika games have history x rolls?
The thing is, Dr. Mario needs to regulate colours, not whole pieces. So they can't just reuse the same randomizer. Also, ACE uses 7-bag, and nobody knows what Jewelry Master uses.
I strongly suspect that each half of each pill is determined separately, and it is memoryless, and that that particular randomizer cannot be improved upon for the dr mario gameplay. This distribution gives 3 single color pills, and 6 dual color pills. The reason is simple. whiel being starved of a color slows down rogress, it desn't halt the game. if it keeps not givig you red, you can just stack blue and yellows forever and combo like mad until the red shows.
so maybe memoryless is better for points, and a more consistent randomizer would be better for survival?
So there are nine pieces: CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD Unless the player is down to fewer than three viruses left. Dr. Mario is a garbage-drilling game. In garbage-drilling tetromino games such as The Next Tetris, when you have one row left to clear, you can usually use almost any piece to fill that bottom row. But in Dr. Mario, there's a very real chance that your next few pieces won't include any red at all.
