So when it comes to something like Magical Mahjong Warrior Poe Poe Poemy, I have to give Imagineer just a little credit.

Not much, mind you.

The plot consists of the following:  It’s 2016 and the earth is a miserable place, full of death and destruction.  Three demons escape from hell to make things even worse, and Hell’s truant officer Poemy is sent out to bring them back.  She takes along her mascot, of course.

In order to work in the human world, demons need to possess humans, and Poemy is no exception.  She winds up in the body of a girl named Emi, whose mother died when she was only 5 years old and whose father, a ship captain, hasn’t been seen in three years.  She’s being raised by a hulking great bodyguard.

See?  That’s character development, it is.  This game has all kinds of plot, and it even comes with some really bad semi-animated cutscenes to tell it all.

Here’s Poemy and her mascot:

Here’s a couple of your opponents.  Note that the first has cleverly possessed the body of, uh, a fast food waitress to carry out her evil plan of eating all the food on earth.

Not making that last bit up, by the way.  I only wish I were.

After fighting Ms. Damn Big Appetite, you meet another demon whose motivation for coming to earth, best as I can tell, is that she likes beating people up.  I didn’t think to get a screenshot.

You then meet the last opponent, a bespectacled possessed computer genius who’s trying to, I think, hack into hell and somehow depose Enma, the king of the demons, or something; I didn’t really pay much attention.  Still, plot plot plot, this game has plenty of plot.

Also she’s kind of cute, but that might just be the glasses talking.

Anyway, you defeat her at mahjong, you’ve successfully beaten all three escaped demons, you bundle them back to hell and give Emi her body back.  Life’s good, except that it isn’t.  Earth is still messed up and Emi has to move to an underground bunker with her bodyguard.

Oh, and aliens are attacking.

Aliens make everything better, especially when they’re lead by (apparently human) girls.

Also, note that she went to the School of Posing For Evil Conquerors, and she either has really odd musculature or she is sporting some awesome shoulderpads under that cloak.  As we all well know, shoulderpads make the villian.

Anyway, Emi has a flash of insight and summons Poemy back out of hell to fight off the alien invasion, using mahjong which even aliens know how to play.

You beat her, you realize that you’ve driven off the aliens but the Earth is still a barren wasteland of pollution, and then Emi taps into Poemy’s magical demon powers to clean the atmosphere and make the world bloom with flowers.  As the credits scroll, you see the demon escapees being punished by doing endless mounds of laundry, you see Emi being taken to the zoo by her hulking great bodyguard, and then… just at the end… her father returns and they’re reunited.

Cue upswell of music, cue curtains, let’s call this a wrap.  We’ll make millions.

Now, you may look at all I’ve written so far and say something like “I dunno, it sounds kind of bad”

And you’d be right.  It’s an ugly game and isn’t really all that fun to play.  It’s made easy, at least, because Poemy – being a Magical Mahjong Warrior – can cast spells that do things like let you draw just the exact tile you need to win, or to protect your discards from being taken by your opponent.  Kind of like Suchie-Pai games, in that regard, only it’s bad.

But, at least I’ve played through it and can chalk it off my backlog.

I’ve met Showko before.  The first of the Super Real series I played through was the Neo Geo Pocket Color “Super Real Mahjong Premium”, which included several characters from PV, PVI, and P7… but after you’d beaten all of them, you unlocked Showko as the game’s true final boss.  I didn’t, at the time, get the significance; it was a tip of the hat to the original game and probably a neat bit of nostalgia if you’d grown up playing, well, slightly naughty mahjong games.

There was, as an aside, a “Super Real Mahjong PI”, but it was only released in arcades and on the PC Engine.  Also, oddly enough, it featured three opponents – “PII” and “PIII” had the same three opponents, but they were split – PII got Showko and PIII got the other two. It seems like they were backsliding there, maybe they were adding animation or something.

PII seems like a much easier game than the later ones, by the way.  I’m not sure if they really improved the AI between PII and PIII, or if they decided to up the difficulty level through less savory means.  Mahjong is one of those games where, if the AI decides to give itself an edge (through, say, better tiles), you really can’t do anything about it.

Anyway, I’m done with this particular series for a while.  I have a few more games in the same genre to play through, though, and somehow I haven’t gotten tired of playing them.  Maybe that’s why the game has been around for two hundred years. 

Well, that is, it’s a pretty short game if you change the options.  It only has two opponents, but beating both of them can take a surprising amount of time on the default game settings.

See, the basic idea of any of these is that you’re facing off against an opponent and need to beat them, oh, five or six times to win.

In the arcade, these games are designed to leech as many Y100 coins as they possibly can, so any loss to an opponent also cancels out your last win.

So, say you’re playing an opponent and need six wins to beat them and move to the next opponent.  You win three rounds, but then lose one.  Now you need four rounds, because losing also cancels out your third win.

The home versions allow you to change this behavior – and, in fact, later home versions have this behavior changed as the default.  With it changed, if you win three rounds and then lose one (or two, or three) you still only need to win three more rounds to move on.

In a way, it’s cheap; you cannot lose the game as long as you’re willing to keep hitting the continue button.  On the other hand, these games cheat pretty mercilessly so I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it.

The ending credits seemed to be really short.  I’m not sure if that’s because they changed the ending for the home release or for the compilation disc or just because older mahjong games really were made with very few people.  I’m guessing it’s the last one, there.

Just to be sure, though, I went looking for a FAQ.  I couldn’t find one.  What I DID find was a blog post – not in itself particularly racy, but the site it’s on is probably NSFW depending on how strict your IT department is – detailing the short and sordid history of Japan’s “red label” games, those sold with a 18-and-up-only logo.

Here’s an example:

This was replaced with the slightly more restrictive yellow-label rating, like here:

Mind you, calling even the red label games “sordid” is overstating the issue a bit.  They may feature animated jubblies, but they’re only shocking in context; they’re naughty for console games at the time, but I think that “D2″, which was a general-release game from only five years later, actually had more nudity and a less imposing rating.

Put another way: the “Tenchi Muyo” game released for the Saturn actually managed to land itself a red label.  Yes, a licensed anime game based on a romantic comedy.

Anyway, back to the title of this post.

If I am to believe the blog posting I linked to, there were 24 games released with this rating, and I own only 9 of them.

I could be MUCH worse.

Update: Just in case Canned Dogs goes away, I figured I would mirror their list here so this whole post makes sense:

Anyway, I don’t like this particular Akira very much, for reasons which go back a few years.

See, each Super Real Mahjong title features 3 or 4 girls, who you play mahjong against, in escalating difficulty, and Akira is the last girl in PV and thus the most difficult.  That’s not, however, the real reason she annoys me so much.

See, the first Super Real Mahjong title I played to completion was the Neo Geo Pocket Color “Super Real Mahjong Premium Collection”, which was quite a long game.  It had 8 opponents, taken from PV, PVI, and P7, and playing each one involved going through a little adventure mode where you first had to defeat a couple of others, and the adventure mode was of course all in Japanese and I couldn’t read much Japanese so it was mostly a matter of trial and error to figure out how to actually reach each of the girls in order to challenge them to mahjong.

I spent an awful lot of time playing through this, which meant a lot of false starts as I tried to figure out what combination of dialogue choices would get me through to the actual mahjong bits.

Anyway, the first character you face off against, regardless of your other choices, is Akira, so you have to play mahjong with her a LOT.  I got very very tired of seeing her, especially since I really didn’t know much about mahjong at that point and I tended to lose an awful lot of the time.

So I’m going to be upfront and admit that I abused the heck out of the “Save State” and “Load State” functions in SSF in order to play through PV as quickly as possible.

It had a cute little story running through the end credits, so I took a slideshow, reproduced below for your benefit.  Akira’s the one with the little white hair dumplings.

Side note: This brings me down to only having eleven mahjong games left in the backlog.  I say “only” with, as some would say, massive sarcasm quotes around it.  I’m resisting buying the Y1200 PSP game, “Moeru Mahjong Moe-Jang” that got put up on the PSN the day before Christmas until I get through these.

Also, they include panel matching games that let you beat your opponents even if you’re not very good at mahjong.

Oh, and they have pretty girls with character designs by Kenichi Sonoda, which doesn’t hurt either.  Mind you, that’s a heavily generational thing; he designed the characters for some of my favorite OVAs, like Gall Force, Bubblegum Crisis, Otaku no Video… which are all at least 20 years old, now that I’m thinking about it.  Wow.

I feel old.

Anyway, back to mahjong.

One of the things that’s annoyed me greatly over the years is that, while I’ve understood the basics of how to win a hand of mahjong, there have been plenty of times when I would be holding a hand that I thought SHOULD be a winning hand, only to have the computer tell me that I couldn’t use it.

Eventually I hit upon a strategy – never use an opponent’s discard for ANYTHING except going out – that cut those down to a minimum, but I was still hitting the occasional why-can’t-I-win-here moment.

Then I found this site, completely by accident: Osamuko’s Japanese Mahjong Blog.

And now… now I understand a lot more.  I mean, that’s not to say I can actually understand 80% of the posts on the blog, they’re full of a hell of a lot of jargon that I just can’t follow, but I now have an understanding of why I wasn’t able to win with certain hands in the past and what I can do now to avoid that.

To test this theory, I booted up my Saturn version of Super Real Mahjong PVI, a game in a series that’s a completely different level of play than the Suchie-Pai games.  I mean, it’s still pretty low difficulty level mahjong compared to facing off with a human opponent, but it’s a step up.

Four hours later…

I feel pretty good about things now.

Also, I get to cross another title off my backlog.  Only 220 games to go!

Put simply: If I’d tried playing this game back in 1996, when I bought it, before SSF and youtube and gamefaqs… There’s no bloody way I would have been able to make it through.  It exudes an attitude towards the player that, while not entirely out of place at the time, would come across as actual hatred if it cropped up in a modern game.

You will, the game says, make 8 precision jumps from moving platform to moving platform, high above lava while being bombarded by flying enemies, and if you don’t manage to do it, you’ll be sent back to the start to try again.

Modern games generally don’t do this.

The experience did, however, give me a marvelous sense of perspective.  The next time I’m playing a console game that actually does pull this sort of player abuse, I’m just going to put it aside until whatever console I’m playing it on gets emulated so I can get through it the cheap way. 

So it threw me a tiny curveball.

According to the manual, there are three boss enemies, though I’m expecting a fourth just to spice things up.

The first boss character is in, well, an arena. In getting to him you go through a level that is clearly a funnel – you feel from the onset that you are being lead down a path to your doom, made even more obvious by being dropped into a large circular arena with a giant door on one wall – a door you have to OPEN to let the boss out. It all leads to a nice sense of tension.

Boss #2, on the other hand, is just sort of hanging out in a hallway in its level. There’s no buildup; you’re happily wandering through the level when you turn a corner and BAM.

The ensuing chaos was glorious, going from “huh. Haven’t seen one of those before” to ” huh. It kind of hurts and WOW it’s taking a lot of bullets to kill” to “uh, I’m running kind of low on ammo and close to death, is it ever going to stop and fall over?”

And then, after it was all over – WHAT WAS THAT THING?

Glorious.

Now I have two bins.  I condemned an awful lot of S-video cables, Cat-5 cable and USB-to-mini-USB cables to the abyss, and I feel better for it.

I also went through the boxes of tools & electronic parts and culled remorselessly.  I’ve come to the understanding that I will never use the components I bought back when I had a crazy dream of restoring vintage arcade machines, and that it would probably be best if I didn’t have them any more.

Finally, I’ve broken down a lot of product packaging to be recycled.  I mean, not everything – my recent implants from the possibly-benign overfiends at 1 Infinite Loop render me incapable of braking down any shiny white boxes with Apple logos – but stuff like the box for the 3rd-party SNES controller I bought in 1992 and whose box has followed me from apartment to apartment ever since.

I’ve managed to do an awful lot of stuff-reduction in the last year or so, and mostly without regrets.  I’m reasonably confident that, at some point, I’m going to realize that I’ve gone just too far in getting rid of SOMETHING, and at that point I’m going to have to go out and rebuy whatever it was, but I’m also reasonably confident that the cost of rebuying it will be offset by all the space I’ve freed up in the meantime.

On another note: Continuing my walkabout through the depths of my Saturn collection, I’ve come to Powerslave – or, as it’s known everywhere outside the US, Exhumed.  It’s one of the gems in the Saturn lineup, but one that I was worried might not have aged well.  After all, it’s an FPS designed around a Saturn pad, and I’m used to dual analogs or mouse & keyboard these days.

I will be brief: It’s aged VERY well.  The lack of mouselook is, well, a bit limiting, but the game was designed for it.

It wasn’t, however, designed to be finished easily.  It’s actually fairly brutal, leaving you starved for ammunition or health a lot of the time and forcing you to make long, precise jumps over lava pits and the like – and with no mid-level-save, missing one of these jumps sends you back to the level start…

…which is why I’m playing it through SSF and abusing the “save state” function liberally.  Sure, if I manage to finish it, I won’t have done it terribly cleanly, but I think I’ll be able to live with myself.

I SHOULD be the perfect audience for the video game adaptation, which I’ve owned for over a decade and which I hadn’t yet gotten around to playing until this week.

It turns out that, well, no.  It’s an awfully pretty 2D game, has good BGM, follows the story neatly, and throws in some original characters, but it’s not very fun to play.

I should amend that.  The puzzle solving is fun, and I even rather liked the platforming jumpy bits, but the combat – which, you know, I’m a guy, I like hitting things with sticks – is rather tedious.  You have two characters with swords and one with a bow, and the best strategy in every case is to keep the sword characters on the sidelines and use the bow character for everything, because trying to mix things up in melee is a pain in the arse; it’s hard to get close enough to an enemy to hit it without being hit yourself, and when you do get hit, you tend to get hit two or three times and often knocked into a hazard.

In addition, the Big Damn Twist is, well, it’s the same Big Damn Twist, which kind of illustrates the problem any video game adaptation has – you can’t really go changing things too much, so your biggest audience – fans of a show or movie – are Not Surprised when you have the exact same ending.

I think the real problem is, I’d had the game sitting in my “Play this, damnit!” stack since 1998, and there was no bloody way it was going to meet my expectations for it.  A little time spent setting my expectations properly before I began would probably have been a good idea.