Mahjong Towers II: The Rise of Shanghai

           Demo downloaded from www.shockwave.com

                      Reviewed by Sue

Mahjong Towers II is a very nice implementation of this classic
game. Shockwave's version comes in three flavours. There's Classic
where you simple remove matching tiles from the game board in
pairs according to certain rules (eg the tiles must have either
their left or right sides free and mustn't have another tile on
top of them, even partially). Scramble is similar except that the
tiles swap position at regular intervals. The swapping speed
increases as the game progresses. Third is Concentration which is
like Pelmanism. All the tiles start off upside down and you turn
them over two at a time. Then you have to remember which ones
match so you can pair them up.

The game has so many layouts you'll always find one to amuse you.
More are available to download from the Internet. Many of the
layouts have been devised by users. When you're on the Internet
you can see how many times each layout has been played and its
success rate in terms of being solved. Each layout is graded by
difficulty level eg easy, very easy. You're also told how many
tiles each layout contains and the author's name. There's an
editor so you can create your own layout from 1 to 9 levels with
72 to 432 tiles. Just click to add or remove a tile. If you're
happy with one you've made you can share it with other players.

The tiles sets are good too. My favourite was an animated cartoon
tileset. In my head, while trying to match them up, I was giving
them names - twirling dog, cat on mat, space man, dizzy dog,
surprised cat etc. The animations are excellent. You can play the
same toon set in static form. Other sets are classic Chinese (the
usual winds and bamboo etc, not very clear), decorative
(colourful), numbers letters and symbols (large graphics, very
clear), nature (detailed drawings of plants and animals), sign
language (not as tricky as it looks), playing cards (confusing)
and mix and match (takes some from each set - handy if you can't
make up your mind.)

Any criticisms? Underlying tiles are gradually revealed as you
remove the top layers. It looks as though the program can only
display four layers at a time. This means you might actually be
able to match a tile that isn't being show. So it's important to
clear any odd high tiles if you're going to progress.

You can save one game in progress and the unregistered version
allows you to have five playing sessions. If you get stuck you can
shuffle the tiles once.  At first this seemed like cheating but I
decided not to worry about it!

Good? Yes. Buy it? Maybe. The cost is $19.95.






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