The first Ishido clone for the monochrome Atari ST also remained
the best. The main problem for a monochrome Ishido is to make the six
colors
the game requires sufficiently distinguishable. Jörg
Nauvertat (who was responsible for the graphics; Harald Simon wrote
the code) found a simple, elegant and effective solution in inversion.
Ther are only three different tiles, solid, speckled, and trellised,
but they come in black on white and white on black. The symbols are
large and easy to recognize, so the graphics never get in the way of
gameplay.
Besides these technical aspects, the team managed to capture the spirit of the original game better than any of the other clone makers, regardless of platform. The choice of the monochrome monitor was already a good one. It's hard to explain, but monochrome games on the ST always were different, an Ishido fit in well here. The made-up Chinese name suggest an ancient game and has the additional perk of being original, that it does not match its translation is secondary (Huang Shi would rather mean Yellow Stone, the word for dragon is Long).
Huang Shi did not offer a choice of tilesets as the original and several others did. But the one tileset it had was consistent with the rest of the graphics, it had a custom font in the menu bar and it even had a sort of mentor: If you managed to place all the stones on the board, a Chinese sage would appear, congratulate you and give you the number of points you had achieved.
Huang Shi is completely in German, with no option to choose another language. Don't let that stop you, if you know Ishido, the text is irrelevant anyway. And if you like Ishido, you have one of its finest instances here.
