PC gamers have never had a shortage of mahjongg games. Well, okay, the pre-EGA era was a little bleak, but as soon as someone figured out how to display graphics AND colors at the same time it picked right up. For those who don't know, there are two Chinese games called "mahjongg" in this country. One is similar to rummy, with the players collecting "hands" of tiles and playing tile combinations for points; the other involves picking matching tiles out of an elaborate tile layout, with the goal of clearing the screen of tiles. The later game has proven to be more popular in the US, and most of the PC mahjongg games fall into this category.
Most of the mahjongg games you can find for your PC are shareware and freeware releases. The most notable exception to this rule is Shanghai, a commercial mahjongg package from Activision. The first Shanghai met with a good amount of success, enough for the company to release a sequel û Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye û which offered improved graphics and a few new variants of the standard mahjongg game. This release was damn good, but so were some of the shareware games, some of which even allowed players to create their own tile sets. There needed to be a bigger gap (in features, graphics, or whatever) between the commercial and shareware mahjongg games, and now there is. Activision's third Shanghai game for the PC, Great Moments, is not just mahjongg û it's MULTIMEDIA mahjongg! It may be the same basic game, but it looks and sounds better than ever.
Shanghai: Great Moments is a CD-ROM only game, and with good reason. There's a good amount of digitized video in this package, starting with your hostess. Actress Rosalind Chao (best known for her role in "The Joy Luck Club" and her recurring characters on "M*A*S*H" and "Star Trek: the Next Generation") acts as your emcee. At the start of the game, she appears in a excellent-looking video sequence to announce the game and give you a helping hand with the interface. (The Windows interface is very simple, but a visual description of it does further the "no manual" approach that well-done multimedia is capable of.) If you don't begin play immediately, Rosalind goes into a brief description of the different variants on the standard mahjongg game that the package includes. Once you start a game, a small black and white picture of Rosalind inhabits the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Clicking on her allows you to ask for help, either by showing you a match or giving you a hint about successful strategies. Unlike many of the actors and actresses working in multimedia today, Rosalind Chao does her part for the game with charm, finesse and wit. When other companies finally learn that hiring actual acting talent makes all the difference, the PC will be a far less cheesy place.
Great Moments also includes nine different sets of tiles to offer the player some visual variety. The standard mahjongg tile set is included, along with sets with the themes of space exploration, science fiction, romance, art, famous people, music, inventions, and historic events. The art of these tiles is far superior to any other mahjongg game, with the tiles of recent events and people being almost photo-realistic. When you match a pair of tiles, a short animation appears on screen as a reward. These are mostly hand-drawn art (and very pretty, too), but some tiles (usually those from the space exploration, sci-fi, people, and events sets) reward you with a short video clip. For example, matching two tiles of George Bush's ugly mug gives you something to chuckle about û a short clip of our esteemed ex-leader shouting "Read my lips!" If you succeed in completely dismantling the tile layout, you are rewarded with a longer video clip related to the tile set's theme. These videos are of medium quality; they're a good addition, but aren't the package's graphic high point.
As I said earlier, Great Moments contains some interesting variants on the standard game of mahjongg. In the game "Great Wall" the on-screen tiles come under the effect of gravity; if you create an empty space beneath a tile, that column will fall down until its path is blocked. The game "Action Shanghai" challenges your nerves by giving you the task of removing a half-sized layout (72 of the standard 144 tiles) while the computer adds additional tiles every few seconds. "Beijing" is a particularly interesting variant, combining mahjongg with a sliding puzzle game; in "Beijing" you can match tiles by clicking on "open" tiles, or by sliding rows and columns of tiles in all four directions (provided you have some blank space to slide into, of course), which can lead to more than one match in a single move (big points). There are also two-player and tournament versions of the classic Shanghai game, which combined with the 13 different tile layouts (some easy, some nerve-wrackingly difficult) should provide enough variety to keep players happily wasting time as they pretend to be doing actual work in Windows.
Shanghai: Great Moments is by far the best mahjongg game yet to appear on the PC. With this latest entry into Activision's popular series, mahjongg has leapt into the multimedia age. If you're already a fan of Shanghai or other mahjongg games, Great Moments is the package you should be playing with. If you've never played mahjongg, you can test the game out for free with one of the better shareware versions, then graduate to the graphic splendor of Great Moments once you're hooked.
