So, a (mostly) fully functional online game for the Saki contingent. About time?
Via Dave, I found myself spending a big chunk of my weekend playing mahjong. It helped me learn better all the annoying but critically important little details about riichi mahjong. It also reminded me how fast taiwanese style play is, working against its potential for being the most newbie friendly. Maybe one of these days I’ll learn Singapore rules.
In a nutshell, Pairon (or Mahjong Hime as it is localized) is a scrubby free-to-play microtransaction game. Your money goes into buying usable items and customizing avatars–each avatar is made up of a character card and a voice card. The voice cards, well, are voiced by various brand-name voice actresses, who voices different in-game avatars. For example, every player starts out with “Boniboni” which is voiced by Itou Shizuka. The character cards are cards that gains experience and unlock special moves and CG and what not. As you play each game, you have the option to disable special moves, so there’s that.
I haven’t earned enough in-game coins to change the cards, so I don’t know for sure, but it seems you can just switch out the voice card even if you don’t have a matching character card. If that’s not true let me know.
The games are set up in a usual “enter lobby, enter table” sort of way. The table host can configure the risk-reward level, use special items to allow players to get more in-game currency for winning, and the type of rules (Japanese/riichi, Taiwanese, or Singapore). There are also AI players that can fill out a game if you can’t get 4 people (or if you just want to play solo).
The site that is running this game feels a little bit shady mainly because it seems like an Asian site that is now branching over with some English content, except it’s all very under construction-like. None of the payment options seemed familiar except paypal, which somehow doesn’t work when I clicked on it, giving me some error saying I’ve not been whitelisted. There’s also a persistent log-in bug which makes you re-log-in if you closed the client and want to go back into the game from the launch page.
I haven’t really tried playing with other people, except one time some random guy just joined my game. I’m not sure if he knows how to play but it ended okay? I’m not sure if he just disconnected his client or what. Dave has reported problems and I can see how it could happen.
I personally found reading the rules page on the eligible hands a big help. It’s pretty precise. There are a bunch of minor glitches that you’ll get used to, and once you know how everything works, it’s a pretty smooth experience. Little things like “don’t run it behind tabs” or “don’t click on your tiles by accident” go a long way.
Well, it’s open beta, so I’m not too worried. A look in their forum seems to say that there’s a very dedicated if very small user base. I can see how this game can be kind of fun as a single player experience, but it’s got no scene right now. If you want to play with others, it would be something you have to arrange on your own. If you see “omo” out there, feel free to give me a shoutout…if I’m there and paying attention, I’ll do something?
April 25th, 2013 at 4:33 am
Oh gosh, it’s going to take hours on hours just to get enough points for a character =_= damn these kind of games….but I want the cards XD oh gosh. At least the gameplay is fantastic ^v^ (except there are like no people online OTL)
April 25th, 2013 at 7:22 am
mm yeah the moment may have passed for this game at this point.
April 28th, 2013 at 11:59 pm
I heard the Japanese one is still popular? Alice got a nendo last year I think. There’s around 4-5 people most of the time, but you cant tell if they play the same variation as you, since people rarely talk in the chat =_= I usually just drag one of my friends to play with me if I get bored of CPUs XD oh yeah, we figured out that the game only has one chat ._. I mean, it only has one server, but 1 chat?? (eg. We were playing and chatting in a room, and some guy started talking, so we got confused and hypothesized the possibility of a spectator or something, he was talking Japanese o3o Then, a few rounds later, some other guy reacted to my joke haha. He said he was in the lobby ._. We were spamming the lobby chat with caps lock upon losing or winning XD Anywho, I forgot my point….ah….localized version is pretty shitty XD We have around 70 less cards then the Japanese one too!! =3= oh well, still the current best multiplayer mahjong game I know of.
April 29th, 2013 at 10:25 pm
you’re right. there’s basically no online MJ client that can handle taiwanese rules, riichi and singaporean all at the same time, while having an English client.
really sad all the serious MJ bros are playing Tenhou, which is fine except that kind of leaves the rest of the field dry.
April 30th, 2013 at 1:19 am
Ah Tenhou, but I should revise my previous statement to “best English multiplayer mahjong game”. Tenhou is too fast for new players though so I can’t play with my friends whilst teaching them
and it doesn’t have enough moe. But Tenhou is pretty great.