The Second Worst Way To Play Mahjong

 

If you know me, even in passing, you may be aware that I am a big fan of playing Japanese Mahjong which is also known as Riichi Mahjong.  I like it so much, in fact, that during my time at university me and 2 other dudes would travel around Europe going to tournaments for it which led to some pretty interesting adventures.  

If you're unsure what Japanese Mahjong is exactly then to cut a long and complicated explination as short as possible it's sort of like Poker.  It's played typically with 4 people and each of these players have to take turns drawing and discarding tiles to create hands and when one player wins points are exchanged.  You do this for about 8 rounds and then a winner is decided by whoever has the most points.  It's a lot more complex than that are there are a lot more hand variations than there are in Poker but that's the basic gist of it. In actuality it's a lot closer in basic play to Gin Rummy, another card game but every time I ask people if they have played that they say no so Poker is probably the easier to understand comparison.  The wikipedia page for Gin Rummy says its one of the most widely played 2 player card games to this day but I'm almost certain that's total bullshit.

Mahjong has a fairly large popularity in Japan so of course companies came long to make video games of it.  Probably the most famous example of Japanese mahjong in video game form can be found in the Yakuza games where people complain at length that they can't get 100% because they just cannot figure out how to play it properly. But if you dig through the fairly large library of retro Mahjong games you'll find that they are all this weird 2 player head to head variant of the game that is just immensely boring to play.  You may look at an early Mahjong game on the Famicom or something like that and think something like "oh well they had to make it 1on1 because of the system limitations" but that's dogshit because 4 player Mahjong for the famicom exists as a separate game

Also there is this weird abundance of pervy Mahjong games that were exclusive to various arcade machines.  It's the same boring 2 man variant of the game but when you win you get to see some titties or something.

Nowadays it's not something you see very often, if at all.  Mahjong games for modern systems are almost always 3-4 players and in the arcade both Mahjong Fight Club and the Sega Mahjong game are 4 players and the cabs are hooked up to the internet so you can play online, the two player type being the norm on consoles and arcades is long gone, I think.  Maybe there are some 2 player Mahjong games on the Switch or something that I've never heard of but no one gives a shit about those as the market for these kind of games is basically dominated by Konami and Sega.

In the title I said that 2 player Mahjong is the second worst way to play the game,  if you're wondering what the first is, it's that stupid tile matching thing that you get on windows PCs and is sometimes offered as shovelware on some portable systems.  A lot of people just know it as "Mahjong" even though it has very little to do with the actual game, some people call it Shanghai and some people know it as Mahjong Solitare but the point is that this form of it is just a complete waste of time and I'd rather have painful dental surgery than waste my time playing it.

Mahjong Madness #1

Roman Holiday and In Flight Video Games

I know it was YouTube month so I shouldn't really be doing written posts but things got thrown a little out of whack with my trip to Rome.  My original plan was to post a few Vlogs from my phone when I was connected to the hotel WiFi but when I arrived the WiFi sucked massive cocks and I could barely load single images let alone upload whole videos.

Anyway, because I basically walked the entirety of Rome exploring I'm shit I'm far too tired to make/be bothered to upload a video so I thought I'd make a quick, barely game related post about my trip in Rome just to get things rolling again.

First of all let me start by saying fuck Air China.  Air China can eat my dick.  Bad service, bad food, delayed flights, shit movies on the longer flights and Beijing Airport (which I have to go through from Japan) sucks massive cocks.  If you're gonna take a long flight somewhere, don't EVER fly with Air China, the cheap tickets aren't worth the trouble.  Pay a little extra and get an airline with some good service because Air China is easily the worst airline I've ever flown with. 

Anyway Rome was a really nice city, lots of beautiful buildings and churches and whatnot.  The food was fantastic and the people were generally really friendly.  If you ever get a chance to go, you should.  This is a gaming blog so I'll leave the description of Rome there but if for some reason you want to know more just throw me some questions in the stream, I'll be happy to talk about it.

Really what I want to comment on is aeroplane video games.  I never really tried them before in favor of shit I brought with me or the in flight movies but because the security staff at Beijing airport think that all charging devices are highly dangerous I opted to put my chargers in my suitcases and so I was trying to not use all my PSP battery all at once.  The games on the flight were you standard sort of puzzle game/parlor game stuff with a couple of tower defense titles for good measure. 

Now maybe this is just another shitty aspect of flying with China Airlines but the games were fucking unplayable.  I don't mean because they were bad, because it's hard to make things like chess suck, but because they didn't fucking work.  I tried to play Reversi (or Othello or whatever you call it) where the screen just wouldn't respond to inputs, I played a mahjong game where the AI just decided it didn't want to make moves and with no time limit the game effectively soft locked itself and I tried to play a tower defense game but it kept crashing on startup.  To sum it up, in flight games are a bit like playing Action52 but everything is made in flash or unity or some shit.  I'm glad I had a portable with me because if all I had was that to entertain me I think I would have died to boredom or frustration.

The YouTube uploads will resume tomorrow so check back for new videos soon!  Watch this space





Also fuck Air China

Back At Home!! Quick Mobile Gaming Roundup

Right, well I just got back from my trip on Olive Island.  It was a fun little adventure even if it was completely game-less, but I think theses short breaks from ranting about industry bullshit are required for me to not go insane.

Anyway, due to the fact that I had literally just moved into my new place on the day we set out I accidently left all my proper portable gaming systems inside the new house and was left with nothing but an iPhone to satisfy my mid journey gaming needs, which is a bit shit.  So for now, I'm going to give a quick run down of all the mobile shit I was playing while sitting inside that car for 8 or 9 hours at a time.

First there was Mahjong 5, a Japanese mahjong game for the iPhone that allows you to play online completely for free.  Winning enough games generates you "MJChips" which allow you to play the paid modes for free too which is a really nice feature and motivates the player to play smarter to maintain their scores.

The next game was a strange little thing that was recommended to me by a friend via Facebook.  I'll go into more depth on this game in it's own post because it's surprisingly good for a mobile game.  As a brief description, all I'll say for now is that you play as a high school girl kicking the ever loving shit out of strange men.  It's weirdly compelling.

Finally there was Puzzle and Dragon

This is a gem matching RPG monster breeding type game where you build a party of 6 creatures, go into dungeons, match gems and fight monsters.  It's actually really good with an absolutely staggering amount of creatures to collect, however, I'm just going to leave one image for you on why I enjoyed playing it so much this weekend.

Now the rest of my day will be spent setting up my new apartment, I'll see if I can get some videos up in the next day or so.

Return to the Game Centre! Code of Joker

Well it's been a long time, but today I finally made a return to one of the many game centres of Japan.  Pretty much as soon as I went through the door, I was greeted with all sorts of new games just waiting to be played, but the one that caught my attention today was digital trading card game Code of Joker.

If you have seen my prior posts about the game Mahjong 5, then you may notice that the machine is basically identical to that, however the game is obviously anything but Mahjong.  Code of Joker is a trading card game but unlike other game centre trading card games, you don't actually have to buy any cards, everything is done in game and stored on an Aime stat card.

Due to the fact I was with a group of friends, I didn't really get to play all that much but I did the tutorial and one normal game against the CPU, so I got a good feel of how it works.  I guess the easiest way to describe the game play would be like a strange hybrid of Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh.

Cards in Code of Joker come in 4 types that include Units, Combination Monsters, Trigger Cards and Intercept cards.  Units are your basic monsters that you can play any time and combination monsters are upgrades for your basic units to make them even more powerful.  Trigger and Intercept cards are things that you play like Yu-Gi-Oh trap cards but the difference being trigger cards are activated when you play monsters or call an attack automatically, while intercept cards can be activated any time you want.

While I haven't tried them yet, there are lots of other modes that include an online mode that will hook you up with another player anywhere in Japan.  In the game centre that I was in there was also a "live" version of the cabinet, which I can only assume streams the game somewhere for people to watch but I'm not sure exactly.

The only disadvantage to this game is that if you were only staying in Japan for a short time then it's basically not worth playing.  Also, with it being a card game, knowledge of Japanese language, especially Kanji, is required in order to enjoy the game, so if you were a tourist hoping to try out Code of Joker then unfortunately your out of luck.

If you do know Japanese then there is a really good trading card game in here, so I would suggest checking it out.  I'll be covering Code of Joker as well as many other arcade games in the near future, so stay tuned!

Blog Updates!

Well I don't really have time to make a full on big post today, so instead I'm going to grace you with some ideas I have for the near future.

First, I'm planning to do more Isaac videos, mainly of the challenge mode and probably with commentary.  I'll upload them even if I lose, but I probably won't upload every attempt because that will get pretty dull pretty fast, probably the first attempt and then the 5th, 10th etc.

The other big video project I have in mind is doing some mahjong commentary, playing online and explaining why it's bullshit when I don't win.  It'll also be semi educational so it might be of interest to anyone wanting to learn the game

There is also an idea to do a kind of non-gaming related video series but I'm still thinking about that one.

Finally, I have a big month long event that's going to go down starting from around September 1st, but you'll find out more about that tomorrow!

Look forward to the stuff, hopefully you'll enjoy it!

Mahjong!

Well, this post isn't quite video games, but it's close enough so I'm going to talk about one of my favourite table top games ever, Reach Mahjong.

Mahjong is a game that originally came from China, and then when the Japanese got hold of it, they tweaked the rules a bit and it became "reach" mahjong.  The reason for the naming is that when you "reach" it means you're about to win, which is something that you don't do in the Chinese game.

Anyway a typical mahjong game looks like this

The easiest way to describe this game to people who don't have a clue is that it's sort of similar to poker.  You use your tiles to make hands and try to be the guy with the most points at the end by creating certain hands. 

I'm not gonna use this post to explain the rules, but if you google it then there are plenty of websites that can teach you the basics of how to play.

So how is this video game related?  Well the real question is how the fuck is it NOT video game related?  There are literally hundreds of mahjong games for basically every system ever created.  Pretty much all of them are Japan only but the selection is huge.  The best mahjong game avaliable in my opinion is Mahjong 5 in the game centres.

In this arcade version the games are shorter, faster and a single mistake can cost you everything, shit is intense.  The coolest part about these machines is that they are all connected to the Internet, so you end up getting games with people all over the country, no need to worry about finding 4 players.

So that's a very brief overview of the awesomeness that is Mahjong.  For those wanting to give it a go, there is a site called Tenhou where you can play online


http://tenhou.net/

It's all in Japanese but it's not too hard to figure out.  There are also plenty of guides online and I'll probably use the free game Friday to explain it all, so give it a go!  Experience the greatness that is Mahjong!