PrintStar’s Blog

Today’s game is the second in a series of Moraff offerings.  Moraff’s Morejongg is an interesting implementation of Mahjongg for MS-DOS machines.  Like other Moraff offerings for DOS, Morejongg is implemented across a host of graphics modes.  The game should work under CGA graphics, but can be used at high resolution on certain VGA cards.

My Retrochallenge 486 includes a sweet 512KB Trident video card.  Morejongg claims to support some extended modes with this card, but I had little luck outside the standard VGA modes.  For an initial attempt, I tried playing the game in 640×480x16colors mode, but the tiles were indecipherable (in my opinion).  I resorted to using the game in 320×240x256colors, which made the game tiles look better.

The game also supports a mouse, but the user needs to load a standard DOS mouse driver before proceeding.  There was no mention of needing a mouse driver until I attempted to use it within the game.  A keyboard for Morejongg is simply brutal, so I highly recommend loading one first.  Also, if you’ve forgotten the driver, you’ll need to reset the system, which I’ll explain further on.

The game offers three modes of play:

I actually played the middle one, which is referred to as Mega Morejongg, mostly because I completely misunderstood the menu.  The main menu itself is quite disjointed, mostly due to Steve Moraff’s incessant advertising.  The advertising in Moraff’s Entrap was actually a little precious, and it made me giggle when I first saw it.  The advertising in this game, however, is infuriating.  Back to the game…

I chose a 256 color mode because the tiles were hard to see in 16 colors.  Moving to 256 colors, however, didn’t seem to help much.  The game also allows the player to specify the tile background; I highly recommend gray or another neutral color.  Some of the backgrounds are actually constantly changing gradients which, while interesting, make the tiles difficult to differentiate.  The screenshots above all are taken in 256 color mode, so even high color (for the era) doesn’t help all that much with the quality of the graphics.

Playing the game isn’t the greatest experience.  The mouse cursor is actually a square or something that looks like it’s drawing incorrectly.  Determining which tile the player is over is difficult as well.  I became stuck on a few occasions, but the game thankfully has a hint system.  The hint system is maddening, though, as it illustrates every single available match currently on the board.  Showing a single hint would be sufficient, and showing all available matches can take forever in certain situations.  The hint system did reveal that some tiles that did not strictly “match” were actually matches for each other.  Perhaps these “matches” would be acceptable in a high resolution game with better artwork, but such a system doesn’t work with the provided tiles.  The tiles can be swapped out for other sets, which might help.

Once the player has completed a board, meaning no further matches exist, a large amount of statistics are provided.  It should be noted that the score descends as the player makes matches on the board.  The statistics screen enhances the simple scoring (one point per tile) with time elapsed and a few other meaningless quantities that elude my memory.

This game contains a shockingly annoying set of “nags” when trying to exit.  Whereas Entrap’s nagging was somewhat charming, Morejongg is just plain annoying.  To exit the game, the player is required to view a graphical “Please buy some games,” screen.  After pressing any key, the user is presented with a screen stating that the user can press P to print out a handy catalog or press ESCAPE to continue; no other keys work at this point.  This screen is undoubtedly to block the people who just smack the space bar.  After pressing ESCAPE, the user must next page through summary after summary of other Moraff games.   In total, there are six screens describing other games.  The user can simply hit any key to proceed on each, but Moraff has added a timer, forcing the user to sit on each screen for five seconds or so.  This type of advertising is simply annoying.  Above I recommended simply reseting the computer to exit Morejongg as it is the quickest way to get back to a DOS prompt.

All in all, Morejongg is not one of my favorites during this challenge.  I had high hopes for the game after playing Moraff’s Entrap, but this game is somewhat disappointing.  Back in the early 1990s, Moraff’s Morejongg may have been acceptable, being one of the only computer Mahjongg implementations available.  However, in these modern times, far better implementations are available.  For that reason, I thank Steve Moraff for introducing me to Morejongg with this offering.

• Moraff’s Morejongg

I was surprised to find that Morejongg did not load at all on the Tandy 1000 HX.  The system simply froze after starting the executable.  The game ran fine on the 486 depending on my video mode selection.

Tags: 31 Games in 31 Days, Games, Vintage Computing //