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Mah Jong Quest Expeditions (DS)

Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
I started playing this game on Tuesday 2 February, 2021  //  I stopped playing this game on: Saturday 6 February, 2021
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.

February 6, 2021 02:21:42 PM
Played another hour or so last night...completed a few levels but...the "I don't like this" taste is slowly creeping in. Mostly because some of the harder levels start to rely on more and more back tracking..and I just find that frustrating. I guess I enjoy this game as a "hidden object" game (find pairs!) rather than a puzzle (find a correct sequence of pairs to remove such that you can beat the level).

I've just realized that a solution to this is for the game to automatically rewind to a decision point from which you can win...might be expensive computationally though?


February 4, 2021 09:07:26 PM
I've always enjoyed playing Mah Jong - and here I mean the mis-named game that uses MahJong tiles but stacks them up and you can only pull from the edges (you need to pick up pairs of tiles until there are none left).

I guess I like to zone out, I enjoy the (apparent) lack of challenge - but I've noticed something that bugs me (because it happened a few times in the first level I played). Most levels give you options at certain times - say 3 of the same tile are "loose" - but you can only pull two. Which pair do you pull? There's no real way to know the right answer, but getting it wrong can often mean that you'll get to a deadend (no more moves possible) and then have to backtrack until you find a "branch" - sometimes the backtrack can be pretty long, so it can get frustrating when you're essentially trial-and-error-ing your way through the game.

I'm not sure there's a particularly good fix for this other than trying to randomly generate levels that don't have these kinds of situations (worst case scenario is choosing "wrong" as the first move means that 100 moves later you can't win). I'm also not sure if there are "known" strategies that smart players employ when playing? I just try to make moves that open up more future moves. If a move doesn't create new options, then it's worth "saving" that pair for later when each part of that pair will pair up with another tile...

Anyways, having chill fun for now - we'll see how long I go.
There are some powerups in the game - strangely I haven't found what they are/do anywhere in the game or the manual. And trial-error was no good for one of them. Sigh.


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria