mr-do

title: Mr. Do! game: Mr. Do! gallery: mr-do date: 2023-11-26

## Mr. Do! Gameboy

For a while I said Dig Dug was my favorite digging game, but I’ve decided Dig Dug can eat shit. Mr. Do! is where it’s at.

I think what really makes this game so charming for me is the overall fever dream. Mr. Do! is a digging game where the player digs through the underground collecting cherries and avoiding monsters that are summoned through a portal that inexplicably looks like a common household object or food. The player is a weird circus clown with a ball, which you can throw at enemies and must wait for it to bounce back or regenerate before you can throw it again. The player can use apples to crush monsters, or be crushed by them, and the apples can be pushed both by the player and the monsters, which adds a layer of strategy. Once all the cherries are eaten, the clown teleports to the next level. The player also has the chance to try to earn extra lives by killing the random letter characters in the maze, spelling the word EXTRA.

This game is just fun. The ball mechanic is ultimately superior to the air pump mechanic in Dig Dug, and the eat-em-all aspect is preferable to Dig Dug’s time limit.

There are a couple of Nintendo ports. The Super NES version has the crazy colors and single screen of the original arcade, but to my surprise I quickly came to prefer the Gameboy port. The GB version uses its own art style and only shows a partial view of the maze rather than the full screen, which adds an element of surprise. Also, the SNES version has some genuinely e x t r e m el y annoying sound effects.

While the delightfully bright colors of the original are lost, I discovered a Gambatte SGB pallete (2D green/red) that looks wonderful. The options menu is kinda fun. You can select the sfx/bgm, difficulty, and map details, though honestly I could never figure out exactly what the map details part is changing.

Neo Mr. Do! takes whatever the heck was going on with Mr. Do! and cranks it up to 12. There are a few more Mr. Do! games, but they’re actually traitorous Lode Runner variants. Boo.