ScuzzBlog: Diaries February 2022
Entry 6th February 2022: Post 1: ActiVision Shanghai - Mahjong solitaire or tiles.
ActiVision Shanghai - Mahjong solitaire or tiles.
The history of ActiVision is well documented on the web, having
grown out an Atari departure and then only recently being bought
by Microsoft for 69 billion dollars. That's billion.
OK let's not dwell on the money, let's focus on the product. Well
just one product in particular ...
I play Mahjong Titans on my computer. It came free with Windows 7.
For those that don't know the game involves a set of tiles that
are placed on the play area as a defined shape, which may vary,
and you simply match pairs, but can only click tiles that are at
the extremity of the collected tiles, to left or right and which
are not trapped by another tile above. The characters are Chinese/
Japanese as I believe a number of characters from the Chinese are
also in the Japanese alphabet. Don't quote me on that.
The game is a solo player experience and both requires a skill to
remember which tile sits where, and which is going to be beneficial
in releasing another. With each successful pair found, those tiles
are removed from the board. And if you clear them all the screen
fills with fireworks. Quite a good feeling.
The game Shanghai was released in 1986 by ActiVision Entertainment
Software and was ported to... wait for it .. Amiga, Amstrad CPC,
Apple II, Apple IIGS, Arcade, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64,
FM Towns, Game Boy, Macintosh, MS-DOS, MSX, NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-9801,
NES, Master System, PC Engine, Sharp X1, X68000, TRS-80 Color Computer,
TurboGrafx-16, Lynx and partridge in a pear tree.
In 1997 it was featured on the ActiVision Essentials CD for Win95.
This game is so simple and yet very addictive.
Anyhoo the reason for the blog is that I finally nabbed a working
disk for the Amiga. Not an easy task I can tell you. There are
plenty of busted disks out there. You cannot copy the disk. There
is an invisible file on the disk that the computer refuses to copy
and or edit. Just the one disk and loads in seconds.
I do have other various types of similar game on PD disk, and I also
have a Shanghai 93 disk, which is yet another PD disk. Over the years
I have put together a collection of the disks, some of which are of
dubious origin. The DragonTiles version does appear on an Amiga cover
disk and I featured that just recently.
I will endeavour to get a box and instruction sheet for the game
though this is tricky as the game is flagged as rare and Bayers know
this. I guess now that Microsoft own ActiVision, or soon will, they
can legitimately call Shanghai their own product. The Titans game
was developed by Oberon Games released in 2008 and published by
Microsoft.
Check out those three AmiKit disks. They have some surprising content.
ActiVision Shanghai - Mahjong solitaire or tiles.
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