Dr. Mario

Easily one of the best multiplayer games ever, up there with Super Smash Bros. Melee, a bunch of shooters, Crash Team Racing, and Contra.

It does take a while to learn. but once you understand what's going on and that it's a race against the person you're playing against, the game is a blast.

The object of the game is to kill all the viruses in your bottle of pills. Doctor Mario throws pills in that are colored blue, yellow, and/or red. You need to make lines (usually vertically, but horizontally works too) by matching 4 or more of the same color. After a match is made, the 4+ pill halves disappear and the pill halves that are on any side fall down (which could help or hurt you).

So yeah, with those parts that fall down, you can make a combo. When you make combos, the pieces fall into the other players' bottle.

The game is crazy fun, and everyone who plays it and starts to get the hang of it (especially in multiplayer) loves it.

This is the best two-player head-to-head competition game ever. It falls into the lovely category of "quick to learn, FOREVER to master", like so many of my favorites. The game styles can vary from beginner-level and slow-going, to an insane flurry of combos, each packed with classic sound effects.

The basic premise of this Tetris-style game is that a doctor with Mario's face is tossing random two-tone capsules, one at a time, into a huge bottle, and you have to make sure the bottle never fills up, by use of the physical truth that if four like-colored squares line up vertically or horizontally, they disappear into a drug oblivion. In addition, the bottle comes pre-packed with a number of similarly colored "viruses", and your end objective is to either A: eradicate all viruses from your bottle, or B: drop enough trash into your opponent's bottle that his bottle fills up and you win by default.

That's where the heart of the game comes in. To drop trash into your opponent's bottle, you have to make combos, that is, where two or more chains of 4 disappear into a drug oblivion, on the same move. With a lot of practice, 3x, 4x, and 5x combos becomes something of a second nature. This is the kind of game that will occupy your thoughts while you're driving, sitting through class, or on a boring date. You can probably get an NES and a copy of Dr. Mario for under $50 total, and trust me it's worth far more than any $50 multiplayer game you can buy for your trash 3D consoles.

A puzzle game named after Mario Nakazawa.

The person to whom Dr. Mario is dedicated.

The fucker in smash that relies on pills and tornado to snag free wins