I'm Bart and I live in Ipswich which is roughly 80 miles north-east of London. I currently work for the police (in a support role) so I guess I'm Lawful Good! My Chinese birthsign is Wood Tiger (grrrr).
I've been playing video-games for most of my life and I first encountered mahjong in spring 2009 through the minigame in Sega's
Yakuza 2 (PS2) which is a rare example of Japanese mahjong with an English interface. I was fascinated
and frustrated
in equal measure by this complex and intriguing game and by the incomplete instructions provided! I struggled to piece together the complete rules through an assortment of online English resources and then felt compelled to share. I'd been using the guides and forums of the GameFAQs community for many years and decided to give something back, writing a
Yakuza 2 guide explaining the rules of Japanese mahjong. Soon after I imported
Kenzan (PS3) - a fun spin-off from the
Yakuza series set in samurai times which is available only in Japanese. Using a GameFAQs guide in conjunction with educated guesswork, I made it through the game and then reworked my first guide into a version for
Kenzan and wrote a new one explaining the hanafuda (Japanese flower cards) minigame.
The next step was to import a "proper" mahjong game so I bought
Mahjong Taikai IV (PS3) and started writing a guide for that too. I only knew a few basic greetings in Japanese (and when playing through
Kenzan I couldn't even read "yes" and "no" in hiragana) so it was about this time that I started teaching myself, not so much to read written Japanese, but at least to be able to translate it quite slowly! (My high school French and German classes were a long time ago so I can't claim to have any other useful language skills.) With my combined interests in mahjong, guide-writing and Japanese, I went on to import a number of other games for the PS3 and later for the Nintendo DS and obviously I wrote guides for all them too - you can access all my mahjong game guides
here (along with guides for a few other random games, most notably
Battlefield 3 and
Sleeping Dogs).
Having acquired a reasonable knowledge of the rules (and after struggling to find a definitive English resource previously) in the summer of 2010 I decided to make a complete general PDF guide to the equipment, rules and terminology of modern Japanese mahjong. Unrestrained by the standard plain-text format of GameFAQs, I was able to make this more user-friendly by adding hyperlinks and diagrams throughout - you can download the current version of my guide
here.
I often joke that I enjoy reading and writing about mahjong more than I do playing it but to a greater extent that is true. I only played online for a few months (on
Janline-R (PS3) where my ID is Barticle), I've never played in real life and show no real interest in developing advanced strategy. I tend to play now only when I'm in the process of translating a game and writing a guide for it. I don't think I've played any form of mahjong for about six months
so I guess it would be fairer to categorize it as an "interest" rather than an "activity" now!
My favourite yaku is probably Honitsu (half flush) - I always go for that more often than I should - but arguably the most beautiful hand is Tsuuiisou (all honours), preferably stacked with Chii Toitsu (seven pairs). My favourite mahjong video-games are
Mahjong Fight Club (PS3/DS),
Akko de Pon (DS) and
Mukoubuchi (DS) and I live in the eternal hope that one day Sega will bless us with a home version of
MJ5 (or perhaps
MJ6 by then) for the PS4.
I'm a passionate collector of most forms of electronic music and for many years I've contributed to a large online music database called Discogs (my profile is
here). I also record occasional DJ mixes and you can listen to some online
here (those are all reasonably accessible, the chilled Balearic ones especially so). I also enjoy cycling (unless it's hilly, windy or cold!) and reading (mainly science fiction). The best book I've read this year is
Ready Player One by Ernie Cline (which just happens to include a small but perfectly formed joke about D&D alignment).
