ancient constructs prized
within a magic mirror
thanks to tiles paired
Additional Comments:
Another guilty pleasure sweeps Beat All Games: first with Backgammon, and now with a generic Japanese tile game. I've always enjoyed Mahjong solitaire games, both for their simplicity and complexity. I remember playing Shanghai quite a bit as a kid, and while I'm certain I was alone on the idea that solitaire games were enjoyable, I didn't care. I came across a copy of Toride priced at a couple dollars. I was curious as to what it was and tried desperately to find some answers online. There seems to be very little information regarding this game out there, but as soon as I found out it was a tile game that wasn't Mahjong (yes, Mahjong, and Mahjong solitaire are two totally different games; unfortunately, we here in the west have been mislead for far too long) I was sold - especially since I don't own a copy of Shanghai. And speaking of Mahjong vs. Mahjong solitaire, you wouldn't believe how confused I was when I first gained access to some Super Famicom ROM's several years back and couldn't make heads or tails of these strange Gin Rummy-like games. Of course, everything being written in Kanji and Hiragana didn't help much either - in fact, it just obfuscated the situation that much more.
Fortunately for me, Toride's menus are easy to navigate and I can at least make plausible presumptions regarding the story. Everything else is strangely in English, which is something I've always pondered when it comes to Japanese releases. Why is there a good amount of text in English, especially in games that never saw a US or European release? I suppose I shouldn't complain as it does alleviate the obvious language barrier that can easily disrupt gameplay in other Japanese releases.
As tile games go, I enjoyed Toride. The game has an equal share of easy and frustratingly difficult layouts to solve. The story mode is mostly made up of easy to medium hard layouts whereas the single play has some exceedingly mindbending variations in the upper reaches. While some of the harder layouts proved their worth in the story mode, the reliance on vertical elimination wasn't near as apparent as it was in the single play matches. In fact, I didn't even realize that L and R served a very worthy function, which helped immensely with vertical elimination, until halfway through story mode since most of the layouts leveled out rather evenly.
Single match play is a beast of a different color. While the early going is incredibly easy, the latter stages are heavily reliant on vertical elimination, wild card tiles and ultimately hoping for the best when even L/R scrolling is of little help to see what lies below. This was especially frustrating with the red group of tiles. While the other three groups had more than enough tell-tale signs to determine a tile's insignia, well almost enough - fours and fives were often a gamble - the red grouping proved disastrous on more than one occasion. I played through single match play with time attack turned off the first time and I still struggled mightily with the latter stages. Discounting numerous failures, I spent upwards of ten-plus minutes on some of them. I couldn't imagine doing half of these stages with time attack turned on. Hmm, sounds like a challenge to me. Turning time attack on, I played through all of them again. While the déjà vu helped, I still faced failure after failure as I exceeded my hand in the upper reaches. But at the same time, having time attack on forced me to exercise both tile scouting and field elimination that much quicker and in the end helped as well.
Overall, what can I say? It's Mahjong solitaire. Honestly, that's enough to make me happy and besides, as long as the puzzles are solvable, there's really no way to screw the concept up. Sadly, since the game is little known, there's very little information out there, and that includes music selections. The music isn't the best, but after a while a couple of the pieces definitely grew on me. Unfortunately, that's all I can really say about that.
Nano-What?:
Interestingly, while trying to dig up what little information I could about this game, I found that Toride has some skeletons in the closet. Surprisingly, Toride is a port of an arcade game. Well, I guess it's not that surprising given it's a Japanese game and you consider stuff like Pachinko - sure, why not? But apparently there were two versions of the original arcade: the one on which the Super Famicom game is derived and one which has replaced all the beautifully rendered temples and monuments with...erotica. Hmm. This isn't the first time I've seen this but I certainly have to wonder, especially since the "models" are all drawn as opposed to the digitized scans found in say Erotictac or Miss World '96 Nude - although I certainly wouldn't call that an advancement in technology on their part. But what really makes me wonder is why any of this exists in the first place? Were these developers that apprehensive about their product that they had to peddle smut in order to attract potential gamers or were they all just lowly smut peddlers with some minor programming skills that chose to gift a plethora of repugnant nudes on the heels of a less than desirable puzzle game? Fortunately, Toride is a functional game and rather enjoyable at that, but the idea to play it just to see some 16-bit nudity? No thanks. I suppose we can only be grateful that none of that transferred over into the SFC port.
Huh, who would have though that a tile game would lead to a discussion on badly digitized smut?
Rating: 3.5 skeletons out of 5
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