Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game

When I lived in Japan in the 90s, I was really confused why all my Japanese friends would go to these arcades and play this strange game they called Mahjong. It seemed really boring and why not play with real tiles for free? But, after watching for a few minutes, my 16 year old body deeply understood.

Japan back then was (still is?) very perverse, and very censored. Imported playboy magazines had the female private parts physically scratched out. I'm not joking, someone had a job which required them to take a small metal rake and scratch out parts of a magazine, a magazine that was imported because it had western nudity. I really want to find someone that did that job back then and understand how they squared the sacrifices they made on a daily basis to protect the general population. Is this like being a veteran of a war, do people respect you for this difficult and impossible job you had to do?

This is really cool. Old school video game developers were really creative with their usage of technology.

Mildly related, in high school back when Power Point was new (yes, dating myself a bit), I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town. Users could click on a door to enter a room, click back to move back, and explore the full house. It was a wild maze of click areas to numbered slides and I attribute this project to getting me into programming.

20+ years ago, I went through a stage of playing lots of strip mahjong games on MAME, mostly because there weren't (or I didn't know) other ways to play actual mahjong on PC (native PC games that claimed to be mahjong typically were solitaires).

Many of those strip mahjong games are interesting in terms of aesthetics and could be potentially very fun, but they are very blatantly rigged. They typically let you win the first match by giving you a highly improbably good hand, and then do the opposite in the second or third. This quite detracts from the fun, and I pity the people who put many actual coins in them.

I liked to play the ones that had at least one or two matches that felt more or less fair (typically the second and third, or so). I vaguely remember Mahjong Erotica Golf (yes, a mahjong game that drives a golf game that in turn drives porn) as being one of the best in terms of giving a fair challenge.

At the bottom right of hardware photo 3 I see VR2 and VR3 populated with things that seem to have screw holes. Are these variable resistors maybe? If so, what for? Tuning something I imagine.

And if you want (at least just an overview) of even more strip Mahjong games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaZoMFmMgI4