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Shanghai Mini
  NGPCPuzzleUC  
  opened by paleface at 23:53:09 02/16/04  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=NGPC; cat=Puzzle; reg=NA]
           
About as good a rendition of Shanghai as you could ask for on the NGPC with a seemingly endless variety of tile patterns, a surprisingly deep Tournament mode with amusing opponents, even a versus mode. The only real problem here, and maybe it isn't strictly a problem but I will complain about it regardless, is that there simply aren't enough colors to make it pleasant to distinguish between different tiles, particularly when you get to, say, the flower tiles that can be matched with any other flower, but you can't tell if something is supposed to be a flower or some kind of symbol (a wind or something for all I know) because they're both just miniscule black marks. A little higher resolution and more colors would have helped immensely, but they've done more than would have been expected with the colors they used.
 
  paleface 22:22:22 02/26/24
           
Download added: 00_shang.png (69539 bytes)
  "Playing"
 

 
Shanghai Mini
The credits for this are interesting: Success did other NGPC games--Pocket Reversi, Cotton, and Picture Puzzle, but their name isn't on game; all it has are Activision--who owns the rights to the game name of "Shanghai"--and SNK; credits apparently say "Source code [...] designed by SNK," but the names in the credits are apparently all Success staff; so it appears it was more or less a Success production, but without their company credit for some reason. The presentation is definitely not SNK-style. Discussion: https://www.mobygames.com/forum/game/17553/thread/247039/developer-success-corp/
 
It's a great version of Shanghai. The main game appears to be just playing whatever layout (of six or so) of tile-matching you want on whatever difficulty level you want. The symbols on the tiles are only two colors, and things like flowers, which can match other varieties of flowers, don't really look like flowers at all, so it was tough to tell at first which weird pixelated pattern could match which.
 
But the music and sound is spot-on, and, most importantly, the tiles are razor-sharp; I think maybe it was this game I was actually remembering when a year or so ago I went looking for a Shanghai game on modern systems and SNES, and failed to find a decent one that didn't have blurry symbols, either due to various visual filtering methods or just base blurry bitmaps. Definitely not a problem here, eyeballs rejoice!
 
There's even a story mode! (Confusingly named "Tournament.")
 
And there's a VS CPU mode where getting lots of matches dumps extra animal tiles onto your opponent's side of the screen; I guess I like to take my time in Shanghai and the CPU did NOT wait around so I got trounced. Not quite my thing, so I can skip this mode. ^ _"^ (Oh, might've picked the hardest of 3 CPU opponents.)
    

 
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