Baud Attitude

I’m quite the fan of mahjong games, or at least the sorts of mahjong games you get on consoles, which are generally two-player versions of mahjong where you get to play against cute anime-style girls in skimpy outfits. Not really “proper” mahjong at all, but I like it.

The console mahjong scene has gotten pretty quiet since the glory days of the Saturn -I don’t think it’s so much that the market for scantily clad anime-style girls has gotten any smaller in the intervening years, it’s more that the big mahjong franchises have moved to the PC where there’s less censorship.

So, modern games are pretty few and far between, but I do see the occasional release, and that brings me, in a rather awkward way, to the rather awkwardly named Chu~Kana Janshi Tenho Painyan Remix.

This is a remake of a PS2 game from a couple of years back, which I think is related to the Suchie Pai series somehow. It’s got the Kenichi Sonoda character designs, it’s got Kanai Mika doing the voice of the main character, I don’t know if it actually fits in to the Suchie Pai universe anywhere but it’s at least a spiritual sequel.

The plot, as best as I can interpret it, involves a rather bratty mahjong master who wants to collect a bunch of mystical stones for the purpose of defending the world from a menace, the nature of which may or may not be specified, but there’s an awful lot of kanji I don’t recognize and really it’s not that important.

You meet people, who are almost all cute, young, and busty, you have a conversation, you play mahjong with them, and when you win you unleash an energy attack that co-incidentally blows most of their clothing to shreds so you can properly search them for these mystical stones.

No naughty bits are exposed, this being a DS game and all that.

Then you explain WHY you had take their mystical stone, they see the light, team up with you and you go off to search for more of the mystical stones together.

Like I said, the plot’s really not that important. It’s mahjong with a dose of cheesecake and Suchie-pai-style over-the-top special attacks and powerups.

Oh, and there’s a Tanuki girl and a seven-tailed-fox-girl in it, which aren’t exactly common moe’ style characters, so it gets some points there.

On the other hand, there’s really no reason to play through it more than once, because there seems to only be one path through the story, and the power-ups and special attacks kind of detract from the actual playing mahjong, so I can’t really recommend it unless you’re a big Kenichi Sonoda fan or you’re enough of a mahjong fanboy that you’ll try anything.

Unfortunately, that describes me pretty well.

Update:  This post gets an awful lot of hits for “Tanuki Girls” and “Cute Tanuki”, so, for those of you who came here looking for that, here’s a scan of Tanuko’s character page from the manual.  Knock yerself out.

You remember, back in 1992, back when you’d played the first Sonic absolutely to death and you were waiting desperately for Sonic 2 to come out, and when it did you burned through it in no time at all and were a little disappointed because you’d spent so much time playing the first game and now the second one was over already?

OK, maybe you don’t, but if you DO, or if you have a similar case where you’ve spent a lot of time playing a game and then blown through the sequel because you’d already gotten good at the gameplay in the original, you can probably understand the feeling of mild disappointment I’m having, having finished:

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2.

Granted, I was playing it on easy, and I’ll go back and work through it on normal now, and I understand that there are some songs to unlock, so it’s not quite as much of a “huh. That’s it, then” feeling as Sonic 2 was.

But, since I did bring home a few more DS games, I will probably try some of those first.

My options include:

Mahjong! I can choose between Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai III Remix or Chu ~ Kana Janshi Tenho Painyan.

Either way, I get Kenichi Sonoda character designs and cute girls to play Mahjong against. Suchie Pai has bunny girls and people named after different flavors of pie, but Chu ~ Kana Janshi has catgirls who are also ninja.

Man, that’s a tough decision.

Or I could put the mahjong aside for a quick game of…

Curling!

Yes, Minna No DS Curling.

It was in the clearance bin of the Ikebukuro Toys R Us, and who am I to turn down a 1500 yen discounted DS game featuring Canada’s national sport?

(Disclaimer: I don’t think it’s actually Canada’s national sport.)

Update: Minna no DS curling is not only hard, but incomprehensible, so when I saw a mention on the Penny Arcade forums of an English-language curling game for sale in the Great Northern States, I did some googling and… totally failed to turn up anything about it.

But it did remind me that I should really give Minna no DS curling another try sometime.