Sleeper of the Week: Mr. Driller (PSX, DC)
Sleeper of the Week: Mr. Driller (DC, PSX)
Sorry about the lack of a sleeper last week, but, well, I was sleeping! Illness and all that. Anyway, today we’re looking at one great puzzler from Namco that a lot of people never really played and a handful of us really love! It’s one of the best little modern franchises that nobody bothered to play when it came out! Mr. Driller is basically trying to save his town from a horde of giant blocks that mysteriously fell out of the sky and buried his town! He’s got a drill, appropriately, and a rather odd little pink outfit, and that’s about it. But the story is, as with almost all puzzlers, irrelevant, and the gameplay is what matters here!
In Mr. Driller, your goal is to dig to a certain depth. Usually in the easy game that’s 500 meters and in the regular/hard it’s something like 2500 meters. All you have to do to dig is press down and a button. You can dig as fast as possible, but there’s a catch. You don’t have time to clear the whole screen, so the idea is to dig quickly, and as you go down, you destabilize the blocks you’ve gone past. Those blocks tend to fall down on you and if they hit you, it’s bye bye Mr. Driller! In addition, there are “hard” blocks that take serious work to dig through and suck up your air supply when you destroy them. That’s right, dig down into the earth and you don’t have air! You must find pockets of air before you run out, and believe me the timer is fast! Spend too much time digging at a hard block or trying to clear too many blocks and you’re out of air…dead meat. Go too fast and the whole world comes falling down on you. It’s a fast paced combination of action and puzzling because of the way you have to dig. Some levels force you to dig giant blocks and when you do, you end up falling. You have no control while falling, and when you hit you’d better get moving! Good thing a 50 foot fall doesn’t hurt you!
The graphics and sound in Mr. Driller are pretty standard. Expect decent but cartoony graphics, nice sound but nothing special. Don’t look for a stand out title in that respect, but again, it’s all about the gameplay, and the gameplay is {i]fun[/i]! I found the Dreamcast version to have a bit cleaner graphics all around, and slightly better sound, but they’re both pretty much equal. Unfortunately, both the PSX and DC versions of the game are single player only, as this is a game that absolutely should be two players as well! The arcade version of Mr. Driller 2 is two player, but sadly, has not been released domestically except on the Game Boy Advance, so two player Mr. Driller is pretty much out of the question for those of you without a JAMMA arcade cabinet and $100 for the PCB. The average price of Mr. Driller for Playstaton and Dreamcast is about $15 used. I paid $10 for my Dreamcast copy sealed off eBay about a year ago, but with the prices of sealed things as of late, it’s hard to tell. Demand is low for this one because only a few people go for the cutesy puzzlers, but the game itself is way deeper than it’s image! Go check it out!
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Was fun when Mr. Driller said "ecki" or something heheh. Its a good and fun game.
Originally Posted by hydr0x
Anyway, I was playing it over easter and it was really good fun, can be really frantic with some mad drilling or you can remember to relax and do things logically and not so fast and still make it through. I didn't beat the hard mode though as i didn't have the game for long. When i am back where my dreamcast is i will hunt down a copy. As far as I can remember, the Dreamcast version did not have lots of different modes did it? On the reviews for the new DS one there seems to be all sorts of different modes and characters. I like the idea of a pure simple arcade game though.
