The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’ve said that I’m a fan of the animes that involve Mah Jong. For whatever reason, these shows continue to be mind-blowingly entertaining to me. But it’s only so much fun to watch a game being played, even if it’s being played intensely dramatically. Eventually, you want to play it yourself. But damn, Riichi Mahjong (the Japanese variant used in all these shows) is very complex, and whats worse, it’s almost impossible to find a place, in English, to play it, especially against a computer. (Seriously, you Google Mahjong, and it’s all Solitaire. All of it.) I tried the main online Japanese site to play Riichi Mahjong, called Tenhou. But there’s a big language barrier to get into games, not to mention that games on there are played with an incredibly strict time limit. Like, discard in 10 seconds or we discard for you. Completely not conducive to learning the game.

But I didn’t let that deter me. If I wanted to learn the game, I needed to play it, and that required some little tiny portable game. What better place for such a game than the iPod Touch? So I poked around, and looked what Riichi games there were on offer. Most were all in Japanese, and the rest were Solitaire or shitty. But there was one game, simply called “Mahjong Mobile.” The description in the app store is some incredible engrish. “And the slider is done in the tap and the tile is discard.” Intense. But I don’t mean to make fun of this guy. What’s important is the English in the game, and it’s completely correct and understandable. His app is totally worth the 3 bucks if you want some Riichi Mahjong practice.

The previously mentioned slider is actually, from what I hear, a very nice innovation. Since so many tiles have to be on screen at a time, it can be difficult to actually tap the tile you want to discard. The solution Mr. Matano came to was a slider, which you move along the bottom of the screen. As it moves, it points to the various tiles. Tap the slider to discard the tile it is pointing to. Simple.
The game also has many features perfect for the English speaker learning the game. For example, it lets you use the “American” tileset instead of the traditional one. This one is so much easier to parse because, instead of having the symbols on the tiles, which is especially hard to figure out in the Character suit without experience, it just has a little symbol for the suit and the number of the tile. So much easier to figure out and read at a glace. It also does the thing (which I hear hardcore players don’t like, but I appreciate) where it labels all discards that come from a draw as opposed to from their hand. The tiles players threw away immediately, in other words. This is a huge help in learning to read player’s ponds to figure out what to discard. I’m still rubbish at it, but it’s nice.

But yeah, it’s a solid game. It’s all understandable, so I can tell what it’s saying when it’s trying to tell me I don’t have enough fan to actually call Ron or Tsumo. It gives a results screen that can help explain what fan you have and such so you can figure it out. Sure, it isn’t as good as some sort of dedicated tutorial, but it’s a nice trial by fire, and since I don’t really give a shit if the computer embarrasses me and beats me, I’m having a good time learning it, playing a few hands here and there. It’s also a very podcast-friendly game (although it does the annoying thing where it shuts off the sound when you boot into it. But you can pull up the music controls in-game and just start it back up.) which I always appreciate. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but it’s a very solid program that sets out to do one simple thing and does it very well. I can highly recommend Mahjong Mobile to anyone wanting to try the Riichi rules out. It’s fun times.