Shanghai Mini

Shanghai Mini

Neo Geo Pocket Color - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Success Corporation Publisher SNK Published 1990-07-29 Platforms Neo Geo Pocket Color Genres Active puzzle, Cards, Match-finding, Passive puzzle, Puzzle, Single-screen Series Shanghai Multiplayer Alternating versus, Simultaneous versus Distribution Commercial

Shanghai Mini is a mahjong solitaire video game developed by Success Corporation and published by SNK for the Neo Geo Pocket Color on 1999-07-29. The game incorporates the standard concept of the Shanghai series, but adds additional features like competitive play and even a story mode.

The story mode has a theme similar to Game of Death, where you play a character who looks like Bruce Lee defeating various bosses on their way up a multi-floored pagoda.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes. All classic layouts on hard difficulty, all three AI opponents (with monsters off), and the full story mode.
Finished	2022-08-21.

I started playing this game to get a little familiarity with the Neo Geo Pocket Color catalog. Since I was already familiar with mahjong solitaire games, I assumed this would be fairly easy to win, but I ended up spending several days trying to get through the story mode.

Review

5	4	4	3	5

Best Version: Neo Geo Pocket Color

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The story mode adds some clever dialogue and characters, all of which are well-drawn, and some of the passwords are quite apt.
• The game allows for competitive play with a link cable.

Bad

• The tournament mode uses pre-arranged sets which are purposely designed to make you lose a lot. Many traps are built into them where picking obvious tile matches will result in a game over, so you have to learn, by losing several times, to wait for a tile to match a much later revealed title. This is frustrating.
• The same background music plays through almost every level of every mode. It's not a bad tune, but it gets tiring because it's so overused.
• The stronger AIs are so fast you couldn't possibly keep up with them. And, since they know the proper solution order and can never get a game over, you're better off just copying their moves until there are only a few tiles left, then finishing the last few tiles faster to win.
• The ending of the story mode is stupid. Turns out, the Shanghai master was a sexy young woman who really wants to date you.

Ugly

• Despite being on a system with decent color support, all of the tile art is draw in only black and red. Coupled with the low resolution, this makes them difficult to identify. The flowers and seasons are especially bad.

Media

Box Art

All regions use the game art, just with variations on the graphic layout. It's the kanji for Shanghai, an Eastern dragon, and some mahjong tiles for the word Mini.

• 

  US release.

Videos

Review.

Game play.

Play Online

Neo Geo Pocket Color

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no strong women.
Bechdel test?	Fail	No women ever talk together.
Strong person of color character?	Pass	The hero is pretty clearly meant to be Japanese.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Passwords

All the game's passwords.

• 1F - STR
• 2F - GCM
• 3F - FBI
• 4F - UFO
• 5F - BXR
• 6F - MJK
• 7F - DTH
• 8F - LIW
• 9F - ROV
• 10F - QOM
• 11F - ANY

Credits

Roles	Staff
Planning	Yoshitaka Tezuka (as SiFi-TZK)
Layout	Satsuki Akimoto
Programmer	Makoto Majima
Graphics	Masafumi Kon, Yumiko Higuchi
Music and Sound Effects	Tetsu
Activision Staff	Tom Sloper, Hiroshi Seno

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Shanghai Mini
Japanese	上海 Mini	Shanhai Mini	Shanghai Mini

Links