![]() ![]() However, Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye has 11 different tile sets (including fantasy, flags of the world, sports, animals, vegetables, and road signs) with sound effects and tile animation, 13 different tile layouts (the traditional "Shanghai" formation, plus one for each sign of the Chinese Zodiac, which covers three difficulty levels). ![]() The only 'unfortunate' aspect of this game's release was that the Genesis version's graphics are slightly inferior to the SNES version. |sf> I agree with you completely, because I used to play both the SNES and Genesis versions of this game. Don't let the simple rules deceive you - the depth and intricacy of this challenge will become your new obsession very soon. Play the traditional Shanghai® II or take the game to a new dimension with Dragon's Eye. This classic title challenges you to clear the board by removing matching pairs of tiles. The ancient pastime of mahjong solitaire is reinvented as an interactive video game where each tile you remove may be your last.ĭiscover enchanting music, fun animation and exciting obstacles that are built in to this intriguing board game that will keep you engaged for hours. They even got the programmer of the original game - which was created on University of Illinois mainframes - to do the programming and create. For whatever reason the game isn’t compatible with the Genesis controller, meaning you have to use the regular Sega pad which does a very solid job moving the cursor around, though you’ll wish it was a touch faster.Review Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)Ī history lesson in the failure of PC-to-console ports.Īctivision was the first to sell a mahjong solitaire (for lack of a better term) game for IBM PCs and Apple Macs in 1986 under the name Shanghai. While getting constantly stuck can seem a little unfair, it’s mainly due to not thinking ahead more than anything else. While you only have the one Dragon formation (unlike later versions of Shanghai), the random tile layouts make it a different challenge every time you fire up the cartridge, plus the options to further test yourself are nice. But Shanghai makes up for the visuals and audio with its fun and addictive gameplay that’s easy to dive into and gives you a good test of your brain power. The game also features three oriental-sound background tunes you can choose from which aren’t the best pieces of music but are still pleasant to listen to and don’t really intrude on the game, though you can also turn the music off entirely if you wish. The congratulation screen does feature a nicely-drawn dragon that shoots a fireball. ![]() The tiles look decent enough and the 3D perspective is pulled off nicely, though it can be a bit hard to distinguish between certain designs at times. Like most puzzle games Shanghai is simple in its presentation as you have the tiles on the playing field and not much else. A Challenge mode is also available where two players compete head-to-head trying to slay the dragon while seeing who can make the most matches. In addition to the normal solitaire mode Shanghai also features a Tournament mode, which imposes a time limit for you to make a move and disables the helps. If you succeed in clearing out all the titles you’re treated to a nice victory screen before starting the next layout. Fortunately the game has a few aids available, such as undoing moves and getting hints at possible matches. However you have to be careful about which moves you make, it can be really easy to suddenly run out of legal moves, which will result in you getting stuck. Most of the pairs have to be identical, but any two of the four ‘season’ tiles can be matched with each other, as well any two of the four ‘flower’ tiles. Thing is you can only click on tiles that are ‘free’, meaning nothing’s on top of them and they can be moved to the left or the right. You have to clear the tiles off in pairs by making matches and you do this by simply moving the cursor, clicking on any matching pairs, and they disappear. When the game begins 144 tiles are shuffled and randomly arranged in a pyramid-like structure (known as the ‘Dragon’ formation) and the object is the clear all the tiles off the playing field, in essence ‘slaying the Dragon’. As mentioned above Shanghai is a form of solitaire that uses mahjong tiles. ![]()
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