One consequence of the tile graphics being well drawn and at a resolution high enough that they look good when you are zoomed in is that the PS3 can take advantage of those better graphics. The tiles lose some detail and identical tiles in different positions can lose detail in different areas of their design sometimes making matches harder to spot. This is compounded by the height of the screen being 272 pixels compared to 320 for pre-4 iPhones. Because the PSP’s display has a widescreen aspect ratio the rectangular tiles become squares distorting the patterns a little. When zoomed out on the larger patterns the story is not so good on the PSP though. The backgrounds and tile designs are well drawn and attractive and the tiles look good even when you are zoomed right in. The background music “inspired by ancient cultures” is inoffensive enough that over the six or seven hours I played the game for this review it never became irritating. The reason for the relatively high standard of art and audio is that it is using the assets from the PC and iPhone versions of the game. Graphically and audibly this is quite a pretty minis title. In Endless the pattern is, well, endless, and the penalty you pay for not having a way to point-and-click on the PSP is that you will only ever be likely try this mode once. In the Classic and Story modes as you remove tiles the pattern will shrink making movement across the board become faster and games will only last up to maybe ten minutes so it is not really a problem. The other effect of the slow navigation is that it makes Endless mode very tedious. With fast times for pattern clearance rewarding you with score multipliers this is something of a hindrance. The other problem with having to navigate across the pattern is that it is slow compared to finger-pecking or mouse-clicking. D-pad presses do not always move to the tile you expect and I have found a couple of cases where it has not been possible to select a particular tile (e.g., with free tile highlighting off I have not managed to select the tile on the ‘peak’ of the turtle pattern, though you can with the highlighting on). Games like this where you are trying to select objects that may be widely separated on-screen are best played with a point-and-click interface where the pointing and clicking is done with either mouse (electronic not mammalian) or finger. If there is a match that you cannot see then you can press triangle for a hint which highlights a matching pair of tiles. If you find you have made a mistake you can press circle to undo your last move and sometimes the game will offer you an option to shuffle the remaining tiles and arrange them so you have some matching pairs again with a press of square. To help you find the free tiles you can press the select button which darkens non-free tiles. Pressing L and R simultaneously activates auto-zoom which zooms in to a level that displays all free tiles and is probably the setting you will always use. You can zoom in and out using the R and L buttons respectively and when zoomed in the analogue nub moves you view around. The basic controls are using the d-pad to move to a free tile and then using X to select it before moving to and selecting its matching pair. The difficulty increases as you work your way down with the top layers including only around six or eight different tile designs and more being added as you remove layers reducing the number of possible matches. The game’s Endless mode has you working your way down through a never-ending stack of tiles where your progress is measured by how many layers you have completely removed. The story has the character following clues to find and assemble five ancient artefacts across five different ancient and mythical areas of the world and is told via single-page comics between patterns. Story mode has you play through twenty five games with the pattern the tiles are laid out in becoming more difficult with each one. There are also twenty seven different backgrounds, inspired by the locations from the game’s Story mode. There is a fair amount of variety to be had in this mode with five different sets of tile designs to choose from, ninety nine different patterns the tiles can be arranged in, ranging from traditional patterns like “the turtle” to patterns resembling planes and tanks. Classic mode is standard mahjong solitaire where your aim is simply to clear all the tiles from the board. Mahjongg Artifacts offers three different game modes, Classic, Story and Endless.
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