Whilst this title originally supported the little-used "Mega Mouse" peripheral on the Genesis, no effort has been made to emulate it here. Whilst this was a pretty fun game on the PC/Mac, little was done to properly adapt the game for home console use and as a result the game is rather painful to play. There are a total of 13 different boards to choose from: the default shanghai layout (also known as "The Turtle") and then 12 others in the form of the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. There are multiple tile facings to choose from besides the default mahjong set (thereby demonstrating the clear disconnect between this game and actual mahjong) and the ability to turn off time-consuming animations that normally happen when you clear a matching pair as well as the backgrounds. The visuals are pretty decent for a 16-bit game with colourful animated backgrounds and sufficiently detailed tiles to make out what the various figures are. Otherwise it plays much the same as the familiar solitaire game. There's a "flip" button for use in two-player games so players can hide their hands before their human opponents look back at the screen (take note WiiWare card game developers) and then buttons for drawing tiles and ending your turn. If the slayer cannot clear a pair he must add a tile to the board, whilst the master just adds a tile and then draws a new one. The board starts out with 8 tiles arranged in the centre in a square. There are actually two games included here: the aforementioned Shanghai and a variant called Dragon's Eye, in which two players (or one player and the CPU) are pitted against each other as "Dragon Slayer" and "Dragon Master." The Dragon Slayer is trying to "slay the dragon" by clearing a small board using tiles from a hand of 6 whilst the Dragon Master is trying to "awaken the dragon" by filling the board from a hand of three. Activision's fledgling effort to bring the game as a straight port from PC/Mac fails by comparison to later Sunsoft games using the license, because it tries to be too faithful to the home computer version and hasn't stood the test of time. With four of each tile arranged in patterns stacked several tiles deep there's a bit of strategy to the game and it's remained popular for many years. The rules of the game are the same as any number of modern versions of the game: remove all tiles from the board in pairs, with tiles counting as free when there are no tiles on top of them and no tiles touching either their left or right side.
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