Mahjong is a game that most people by now have played or at least have heard of. The game involves of different tiles and the goal is to match them all up to clear the game. The game is widely available, in fact most people play this at work when they should be working, since it’s available in most computers. This game finally came to the PS3 back in 2009.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNkJsVFT5K0[/tube]
Mahjong has been around for quite sometime and is generally known as a time killer in China. As stated earlier, you start with a stack of mahjong tiles that have icons as well numbers that are in a certain shape or pattern. These tiles are to be matched up with each other and removed from gameplay. The concept is very easy just continue doing this until the board game is complete and cleared out.
The controls can be a little frustrating. The cursor is pretty much the same cursor you see on a computer, but the PS3 controller is nowhere near as precise as a mouse, obivously. As you can see from the video, when you move the pointer with your D-pad or your left joystick the selector doesn’t snap to the tiles. Instead you are having to navigate to each tile individually. It would have been a lot easier to have your arrow glide past the block and just scroll to each one. You need to micromanage and adjust for every…. single… move.
The developers of the game where able to give it a nice little twist, they took something that was old and gave it a new fresh look and concept. It features five parables that are told through nine chapters and narrated storybook cutscenes. After getting a piece of the story, you play a game of mahjong to advance to the next scene, which is a static background with the characters and objects moving around on top of the image, but it fails a bit. Example, the quality of the narration is bad. It’s one guy narrating the stories, and sounds tinny and echoy or far away. Also, the art is pretty plain and simple.
I liked that game, burned time. Which is what I would need when I was bored. Although I really can’t recommend to download this one. This game has plenty of potential if the story line, graphics and sound were a bit better. Not to mention the controls. The music is relaxing and calming. Once again as I stated in my Super Stardust HD review, this was one of those games that I downloaded mainly for the trophies.