In honor of Mr. Driller Online being released on Xbox Live last week, I thought I’d do a tribute blog to all things Driller. Though you may want to skip down to the bottom of this blog first for a quick warning about Mr. Driller Online. Almost didn’t make me want to write a Mr. Driller blog right there, but I still like Mr. Driller so I wrote this anyway.

Gameplay

The gameplay in each Mr. Driller game has gone relatively unchanged, so this description pretty much applies to any Driller title in the series. Your goal is to drill down a well full of colored blocks and dig as deep as you can. It’s like a cross between Dig Dug and Tetris, though don’t call it a Tetris clone, cause it ain’t! It’s really more of a fast arcade action twitch game more than anything. As you drill, blocks of the same color will stick to each other, and if four or more of them match up, they disappear. You have to watch out for falling blocks because if one squishes you, you lose a life. You must also drill quickly as your oxygen depletes. Find air capsule among the blocks to refill a bit of your air. If the gameplay sounds simplistic, that’s because it really is. But it’s also really fun.

Mr. Driller’s Family

While the main star of the Mr. Driller games is “Mr. Driller” himself, Susumu Hori, there’s a whole cast of other characters, some playable, some not, that I thought would be worth noting here. If anything, for how weird it is. Namco must’ve realized early on how similar Mr. Driller is to Dig Dug, so later in the series they brought in Taizo Hori, Susumu’s dad, as the guy who was originally in Dig Dug. One interesting thing I heard somewhere was that Taizo Hori’s name was a play on words in Japan that means “I want to dig” while Susumu’s name kind of means “digging further and deeper.”

OK, so we know who Mr. Driller’s dad is, but who is Mr. Driller’s MOM? Well, I know who it is! Turns out Mr. Driller’s mom is from Baraduke. Baraduke was an old arcade space shooter game, playable on Namco Museum vol. 4, that played a lot like the NES classic Air Fortress. The hero in that game turned out to be a woman. In Baraduke, her name was “Kissy” but in the Mr. Driller games, they claimed that “Kissy” was her nickname because she would get drunk and kiss everyone at parties. But her real name was “Toby Masuyo” which I hear is also a Japanese play on words that means “I want to fly and shoot.” Susumu’s mom isn’t playable in any of the games, but she does make cameo appearances in the background and gives him power ups in Drill Land.

Mr. Driller also has two other brothers. His older brother is Ataru and is usually playable in the Driller games. He’s the one that looks all emo. I don’t know the name of Susumu’s younger brother, but he’s the one who flies the helicopter that lowers the drillers into and out of the well. He flies the helicopter because he’s claustrophobic and can’t dig down in the wells. Of course, in the storyline, Mr. Driller’s parents are seperated, that’s why he didn’t know about his older brother at first. Now, keep in mind that all these details about the characters only refer to the Japanese games. In the US, the only thing Namco-Bandai wants us to know is that Dig Dug is Mr. Driller’s dad.

By now you’re probably wondering how I know all this stuff. Well I can’t take credit for knowing all of this. Throughout the years, me and my friends, as well as Driller fans from around the world, have shared and gleaned this information with me about all the Driller games and backgrounds. So I didn’t learn about all this stuff, it was a collaborative effort. So keep that in mind while reading this that none of my sources on this stuff are rock solid, but good enough for me.

Mr. Driller Music

One last thing to note before I go into each of the Driller games is that most of the music in them is composed by Masaru “Go” Shiina. Long time readers of my blog have heard me spout that name before. I think his music is genius. You would think that a cute game like this would have cutesy, bouncy music, but the songs in Mr. Driller are totally hardcore! It’s really hard to describe Go Shiina’s music, but it usually has lots of strings, vocal chants, and jazz. It’s best to listen to his Driller music on the original Mr. Driller game and the Japanese GameCube Mr. Driller Drill Land, as the other games, being on handhelds, are just tinny remixes of his work. And if you like that music, you should also play Tales of Legendia, an RPG on the PS2, as Go Shiina did the music for that, too. I wish I knew what Go Shiina was working on now. I’d like to know what he was up to without sounding like some kind of weird fanboy stalker, though I may have failed at that.

At any rate, here’s a brief overview of all the games in the Mr. Driller series.

Mr. Driller

The one that started it all. The first game was originally an arcade game released in late 1999–early 2000. It was pretty basic and bare boned, but I loved it anyway. I first played it at a GameWorks with a couple of my friends. I had just graduated college and one weekend soon after, we went to a special event at a local GameWorks where you paid an up front fee and got to play all the games for free for two hours from like, midnight to two in the morning. When I first saw Mr. Driller there, my friends were like, “Ha! Who wants to play a game called ‘Mr. Driller?'” But I had read about this game earlier on Namco’s Web site, so I tried it. With its simplistic gameplay and cute visuals, I was hooked. I played that game over and over for the entire night! I wasn’t hogging the machine or anything because nobody around me wanted to play it, so I just kept playing it!

Soon after, Namco ported this game to the current home consoles at the time, like the PlayStation and Dreamcast. A lot of people were disappointed that it was Namco’s second game on the Dreamcast to follow up with Soul Calibur. But I loved the home version, too. This was back when Namco made a lot of cool games on the PlayStation and I thought they could do no wrong. I also thought Namco had a lot of balls to release and promote a game that could’ve been easily been made more than ten years ago. I guess the only bad thing about the first Driller game is that it was pretty basic and didn’t have a whole lot of gameplay modes, and no multiplayer or anything. Later they made the original Mr. Driller into a cell phone game, but the less said about that, the better.

Mr. Driller 2

In many ways, Mr. Driller 2 is what the first game should’ve been. It added a two player game with a new character: Susumu’s female drilling rival Anna. I think I saw it at an arcade auction once, but I mostly played it on the new-at-the-time handheld: the GBA. Mr. Driller 2 was actually the first import game I ever bought, because I thought it would never come to the US. Of course, almost to spite me, four years later Namco did port Mr. Driller 2 to the US GBA. Which doesn’t make any sense because, by then, there was a far superior Mr. Driller GBA game AND a better GameCube Driller game in Japan that they could’ve ported instead. At any rate, the gameplay is still the same. The two player mode lets you mess up the other player by flipping their screen around and whatnot.

Mr. Driller G

The G is for Great. I think G was only on the PlayStation in Japan, as I don’t remember hearing about an arcade version. This one added the multiplayer mode from the GBA game, as well as a story mode that introduced most of the new characters you see today, like Dig Dug and Ataru. Mr. Driller G is the Driller game I’ve played the least, so I don’t know too much else about it besides that.

Mr. Driller Ace

Probably the best of the handheld Driller games. I imported this one last year when Play-Asia had it on sale for ten bucks (not a bad price for an import game). Ace added two new features to the Driller experience. First was a “Dristone” quest mode. In this one, you only lost oxygen if you drilled a block. You had to use more strategy while drilling. You could also collect crystals that could clear out blocks for you without using your oxygen, and you could buy more items in shops. Fans say this Dristone mode is genius, but due to the language barrier, I have a harder time with it.

The other thing added to Ace is kind of a virtual pet mode where you can supposedly collect and breed little things called Pacteria. Again the language barrier keeps me from fully understanding how to do this, but you can collect lots of Pacteria based on old Namco games. I’ve seen a Klonoa Pacteria, a Genji and Heike Clans Pacteria, Mappy Pacteria, Taiko Pacteria, even a Xevious one! You can also view your Pacteria and put them in a parade one the GameCube Drill Land game if you connect your GBA to the GameCube (when those games were released, GBA-GC connectivity was a big thing–and look how well that turned out, huh?)

Mr. Driller: Drill Land

This is probably the best of all the Mr. Driller games, and yet it was never brought to the US! Argh! Now, most of the time, when a game I want never comes to the US, there’s usually a good reason for it. For instance, when the thrill of seeing your favorite characters in Namco X Capcom wears off, you soon discover the gameplay isn’t very fun at all. Although if Namco X Capcom was ever brought to the US somehow, I’d probably buy it anyway because I’m stupid. If a game for a handheld never comes out here, I can just import it, like the new Taiko DS game at the end of this month. But even to this day it kills me that Namco never brought Drill Land to the US GameCube.

There are tons of fun gameplay modes and it just screams quality. Drill Land has an amusement park motif, and each gameplay mode is based on an attraction. The space mode has lots of crazy power-ups brought in by Star Trigon characters and Susumu’s mom. In the haunted house mode, you have to inject the blocks with holy water before drilling them so the ghosts won’t come out and hurt you. There’s an Indiana Jones style mode where you collect treasures while avoiding traps like spikes and rolling stones. And the “Dristone” quest mode returns as “The Hole of Druaga” which is a reference to the Japan arcade classic The Tower of Druaga. And there are also extensive single and multiplayer regular modes as well. Lots of fun. If there were an easy way to play Japan GameCube games on the Wii, I’d import Drill Land in an instant (if I could even find it now). Oh well, at least I can play Drill Land at my friend’s house.

Mr. Driller Drill Spirits

This was out when the DS was young and it was still cool to put acronyms in your titles that have D.S. in them. Driller DS was kind of fun, but it was a pretty lazy port since all the graphics were just from the GBA games. The DS let you see falling blocks from two screens, and you could also control Mr. Driller with the touch screen and stylus if you wanted to, but it was pretty dumb. There was also a new mode where a giant drilling robot chased you from the top screen, and you had to collect “Drill Spirits” to fire up at it to slow it down and destroy it.

There are two problems with Drill Spirits in the US, though, and both have to do with stuff that Namco took out of the US version. One, they took out the “Dristone” mode, and two, they took out single cart, multiplayer play. Both of which are in the Japan AND European versions of the game! Because of this, my friends and I refer to the US Drill Spirits game as “Cripple Driller”

Driller Cameos

Before I conclude with the newest Mr. Driller game, I’d like to go over some games that had Mr. Driller show up as a cameo appearance in other games, as Namco characters are wont to do. In Moto GP3, you could race as Mr. Driller on a motorcycle. And speaking of racing, in the PSP version of Pac-Man World Rally, you could also play as Mr. Driller. His dog Puchi rode in the sidecar on Susumu’s pink cycle.

There was an arcade game in Japan called Star Trigon that only used one button for thrusters for your spaceship. You circled around small planetoids but could break from their gravity and circle around other planets. In this fashion, you were supposed to make triangles by connecting planets. There were three playable characters, and one of them was Susumu Hori. Star Trigon also had the same art style as the Mr. Driller games. I wish I could play Star Trigon. Like Libble Rabble, it would be cool to play on Xbox Live Arcade.

On the DS a couple of years ago, there was a Dig Dug remake called Dig Dug: Digging Strike (again with the D.S. acronyms). It had the same Mr. Driller art style and had Susumu’s dad as the main protagonist. But Susumu also showed up to help his dad, mostly in Namco fanboy ways like flying the Xevious spaceship or driving the Rally-X car, which was awesome. I really liked Dig Dug: Digging Strike, but I’m probably the only one who did.

Mr. Driller Online

Finally. The newest game in the Driller series was released last week on Xbox Live Arcade. I was really excited about it before it came out. I wish I could say it exceeded my expectations, but I’m afraid that as of right now, Mr. Driller Online is a stinking pile of doo-doo.

The single player mode is decent enough, though a bit too similar to Drill Spirits. There’s a new Quest Mode that I thought would be like the Dristone mode, but it’s not. It’s just the regular mode with annoying requirments you have to fill every so often, and if you don’t, the game ends. It’s a pretty lazy port, too, as the graphics are lifted from Drill Spirits (not good in the HD world). The music is from Drill Land so I guess that’s a good thing since it’s Go Shiina songs. The achievements are ridiculous (Win 10 consecutive online matches? Yeah right.).

But the worst thing about Mr. Driller Online is the multiplayer. You can only do it online, but the online modes are broken. It’s hard to find a match with another player, and once you do, it’s so slow and laggy that it’s totally unplayable. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Xbox Live being updated recently or if the game is bad itself. In any case, I hope they issue a patch for it that fixes the problem. If the online stuff worked well, my opinion of Mr. Driller Online would probably increase tenfold for the better. And if they don’t make a patch, I think Namco should refund everyone who bought it their 800 points back. Though I know that’ll never happen.

It’s kind of embarrassing since I just recently praised the Xbox Live service over the Wii’s online capabilities in regards to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And it’s a shame about Mr. Driller Online since Namco’s last Xbox Live game: Pac-Man Championship Edition, was so brilliant.

Kind of a sad way to end a blog about one of my favorite Namco games, but there you go. I hope you enjoyed my Driller blog and maybe even learned a thing or two. And if you know something about Mr. Driller that I may have missed, please share it! I’d love to learn new info about Mr. Driller! Later! –Cary

Tags: Misc