What is it?
Many of the things I said about Othello F/X are valid for TOAG as well. Others are not. For one, Ishido by its nature does not require any AI, so this problem is irrelevant here. Furthermore there are far more Othello implementations than there are Ishido clones, and few of the latter are really good.
That Pesky Bar
The main problem with all the Locatha games is their re-release. Originally they were all shareware. While I never could dig up one of these original versions, I have little doubt that they simply ran in 640×480, still the most common screen resolution in 1998. At the time, only few games (Legal Crime and New Beetle Tracks & Gaps are examples) did not at least support it.
But early in 2001, Locatha changed their business model. They re-released all or at least most of their games as freeware, but somehow integrated them with their website. They slapped a bar on top of the game window with three buttons that would connect you with various pages, after each game you are invited to upload your score, and if you open and then close the about screen, it will open the website, too. As a side effect, the games now required an 800×600 desktop, basically something that had become quite common in the meantime.
TOAG suffered more under this than Othello F/X, mostly because its screen layout is the most egregious waste of real estate I've seen outside Othi, TT95, or T-C v4: the actual playing field is only 370×250 in size. Running fullscreen this probably won't have mattered a lot. But whether I played it on a 23" at 1600×1200 or a 14" at 800×600, it felt too small and I kept confusing the two birds. The tiles aren't exactly models for clarity.
Ishido for the Silver Age
Overall the graphics of TOAG aren't bad. They are a bit cheesy; the texture of the playing field, for example, could be found everywhere at the time as a free website background. I used it to make linoleum floors for The Sims. Locatha games tend to remind you of Netscape-enhanced webpages, but in that they exactly met the spirit of the time.
What I like to call the Silver Age of computer gaming—roughly the second half of the 90s—wasn't about bright colors. It wasn't about flowers either. It liked the dark damp dungeons of Diablo, the game that defined the era. It liked grungy things—broken brickwork, cracked concrete, peeling paint, withered wood, rusted iron. If there was something bright, it was usually lava.
TOAG is mostly based on the Egypt tileset of the original Ishido, but it is a darker version, just as Sentinel Returns was a darker version of The Sentinel. Its Egypt is more like the Crypt in Hellfire. When you place a tile in the Within, where it scores, a strange and slightly menacing sound effect is played, as if some spell had been cast. The menu is red text on black background, common on game websites of the time.
Through all this, it gives the game something that IMHO is an essential part of Ishido: atmosphere. A dark atmosphere in this case, but that was the spirit of the time. So in spite of its shortcomings, TOAG really isn't a bad Ishido clone at all.
