- What is it?
- A Shisen-sho game,
1990,
Amiga and
Atari ST;
1991,
DOS/EGA or
Hercules.
- What computer or emulator will it run on?
- Probably any PC with EGA or Hercules.
- Tags
- Hercules, AdLib.
Around 1989/90, a Shisen-sho craze swept the German Atari scene. Most of these games were freeware, but there were three multi-platform commercial releases: Turn It, Lin Wu's Challenge, and Sarakon, which added layers to the original concept. Of these three, Lin Wu's Challenge is the most sophisticated and at the same time closest to the original Match-It arcade machine.
The creators put a lot of thought into Lin Wu's Challenge, and showed a love for details. The game came in a fine wooden box instead of the usual cardboard. The manual was printed on a yellowed paper that looked like an old parchment.
Then, there were some strange attempts at humor too. The game is organized into tournaments against opponents like Street Fighter, in itself a strange decision, especially seeing that there is no AI to beat in a Shisen-Sho game. You start in Germany against the leading economist H. Becker (one of the two founders of Data Becker, a German publisher of computer books and software, is named Harald Becker), your next opponent is a Greek monk named Aeneas Sorbas, and I never played past that.
The Amiga version is without doubt the best one, and that was probably the platform the game was originally developed on. It runs in hi-res mode, and makes some moderate use of overscan (the active screen is about four or five pixel wider than the standard 640), but uses 16 colors only. A contemporary review in Amiga Joker gave it 80%, but deplored the lack of mouse support, deeming the joystick inexact. Playing it in WinUAE I had no problem with the joystick control (then I use a gamepad, not a joystick), but found the choice of the space bar for taking back a begun but unfinished turn rather unintuitiv. The Esc key instead takes you back to the menu screen, abandoning the current game completely.
I cannot say much about the popularity of the game on the Amiga. You will find it in most databases, but there are usually very few comments.
The ST version ran in lo-res mode, but it used overscan more, with
an active screen of about 292×244. Controls were exactly the same
as in the Amiga version. The music was converted by then 21 years old
Hamburg musician Frank Seemann, one of his first works for computer
games.
Again, I cannot say how popular the game was on the Atari ST. A
contemporary review asserts it addictiveness
but deplores the copy
protection system which forces you to play off the original disk all
the time. A backup could be bought for DM10, about 10% of the price of
an average computer game at the time, but also the price of ten or
twenty empty floppies. Since the
whole Shisen-Sho craze was mainly an Atari thing, I guess it
was more popular here, at least it made it on Automation disk #336.
Compared to the other two, the PC version was pretty bad, and that it pretended to support things it didn't didn't make it better. At the start you get a choice between Hercules, EGA, and VGA graphics, but the latter two are identical, if you choose VGA it will nevertheless run in EGA mode. Nor do I think it actually supported Soundblaster, except through the AdLib simulation all the old Soundblaster cards have.
On the one hand, the graphics were simplified, the slight 3D look that shows the sides of the board was gone. But on the other hand, the texturing of the stones was left in. This was fine in the previous versions, where a 4096 color palette supplied sufficiently similar colors; on the 64 color EGA palette, the contrast is far to strong, and the stones are occasionally difficult to discern.
One thing that was added to the PC version is mouse support. It was implemented a bit weird, there are now two cursors: the crosshair keyboard cursor, moved by the W, E, R, S, F, X, C, and V keys, and the arrow mouse cursor. They move independently. This arrangement may have been chosen to facilitate hotseat two-player mode, which all versions supported.
Another improvement of the PC version is that to deselect a selected tile, you simply select it again, a far more intuitive system than the space bar of the previous versions.
Like numerous other solitaire Mahjongg games, your goal is to remove 2 matching tiles at a time to clear the pile. The gameplay is very straightforward and quite dull, as it doesn’t have nearly as many options as Activision’s Shanghai, and the graphics is below par. Worth a look only if you collect Mahjongg games. There are many better games on the market.
