Reachmahjong.com

With Janryumon Mobile going offline on 10-Jan-2014 (though I can still play offline ... for now anyway), I started to search for some good replacements. I ended up logging into the Japanese iTunes store (you can create an account with another email address to access the Japanese iTuens/Apple Store - it's free and you can at least download free apps). Right away I saw a somewhat newer entry to the Mahjong listings... Sega's NET MJ.



Mahjong by SEGA. Seemed promising! They updated it just last month to v1.1 so I figured major bugs would be worked out already. And it was free.





Offline CPU battles appear to be free. It gave me a generic login so I could play online, but I didn't try it.



In free offline mode, you can play traditional 4P or 3P matches.



Lots of cool touches including a nice animation showcasing the "flipping" of the Dora Indicator.





Most option buttons come with ENGLISH text underneath. Woot!





Overall, solid title. I haven't yet played online, but the offline play is fantastic and it's already quite polished. Most of the option buttons have ENGLISH in small letters underneath (PON, CHI, RON, Skip, Confirm, etc.) so it's trivial to play in English. Not much in the way of being able to tweak rule sets, but what it defaults to seems fine by me. I wish they had a way to play quarter games, etc. but I really can't complain. I guess they will be making money on the Online/NET portion of the game. Definitely check this one out! The official iOS page is here: https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/net-ma- ... 06963?mt=8 and the official SEGA page is here: http://sega-mj.com/

Great review! Color me intimidated by Sega though - the game looks niceeeeeeeeee.

diddysinatra wrote:Great review!

Yes, good coverage as always, thanks Dave. Looks pretty similar to the PC version which I discussed previously.

diddysinatra wrote:Color me intimidated by Sega though - the game looks niceeeeeeeeee.

For the full effect check out the current version of their arcade system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caSLZQB6z5Q

Looks similar to (and is probably related to) the MJ15 arcade game also by Sega in arcades in Japan. I haven't tried any of Sega's Mahjong games yet, but might take a look at this one at some point. Thanks for the review!

EDIT: Just saw Barticle beat me to the MJ15 comment.

The current iteration is MJ5 - but just imagine how amazing MJ15 will look!

Barticle wrote:Yes, good coverage as always, thanks Dave. Looks pretty similar to the PC version which I discussed previously.

Looks very similar indeed! I wonder if the two online versions play nice together -- that is, do people playing the PC version and the people playing the iOS Mobile version play on the same server?

Cross-platform play is a great idea - and especially beneficial towards the end of a product's life-cycle when the player counts are dwindling - but it's something that seems not to happen very often. Probably for technical reasons, or maybe political?