Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game
A deep dive into the 1991 arcade game Idol Mahjong Final Romance, which uses rotoscoped photos and a low-frame-rate slideshow presentation. The article explores its unique hardware, including the V-System GGA chip and 8x4 tiles, and contrasts it with its sequel, which switched to anime-style art. The author also ponders why the original game was excluded from the modern re-release.
This is especially true when paired with another choice made. When tilemaps are loaded in, the palette is blacked out, and then the palette is only loaded in afterwards. This is presumably to prevent you from seeing some kind of partial abomination.
- hightrix
This is really cool. Old school video game developers were really creative with their usage of technology.
Mildly related, in high school back when Power Point was new (yes, dating myself a bit), I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town. Users could click on a door to enter a room, click back to move back, and explore the full house. It was a wild maze of click areas to numbered slides and I attribute this project to getting me into programming.
- Al-Khwarizmi
20+ years ago, I went through a stage of playing lots of strip mahjong games on MAME, mostly because there weren't (or I didn't know) other ways to play actual mahjong on PC (native PC games that claimed to be mahjong typically were solitaires).
Many of those strip mahjong games are interesting in terms of aesthetics and could be potentially very fun, but they are very blatantly rigged. They typically let you win the first match by giving you a highly improbably good hand, and then do the opposite in the second or third. This quite detracts from the fun, and I pity the people who put many actual coins in them.
I liked to play the ones that had at least one or two matches that felt more or less fair (typically the second and third, or so). I vaguely remember Mahjong Erotica Golf (yes, a mahjong game that drives a golf game that in turn drives porn) as being one of the best in terms of giving a fair challenge.
- haunter
And if you want (at least just an overview) of even more strip Mahjong games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaZoMFmMgI4