And patience is needed

Patience games have always been very popular on micros, probably because you don't have to waste time laying out the cards, and the pack never gets dog-eared or sticky.

Well, now you can enjoy the pleasures of patience with the colourful variety of Mah Jong pieces on your 32 bit micro. There are 144 blocks with Chinese characters and symbols painted on them representing suits of bamboo and circles, the four winds,/ the four seasons and four flowers. There are four each of the suits and winds.

A pyramid pattern is built up, and the idea is to remove every piece by matching pairs, the problem being that only those tiles at the end of each row can be used.

Although there is a strong element of chance affecting which tiles end up where, skill is required in deciding what order to perform the matches.

The package contains a disc and a single sheet of instructions which are sufficient for the purpose. To start, you just double-click the !MahJong icon and hang on for the software to load.

An icon appears on the icon bar with the message "inactive" below it; clicking this brings up a window and starts a new, random, game.

Also on the disc are 17 pre-saved start positions to try your hand at. They have very nice yin and yan file icons which can be loaded in the usual way, either by double-clicking or dragging.

Playing the game is simplicity itself, just click on the first of a matched pair which then inverts and then on the other and they both disappear - the program won't let you make a mistake.

This is the point where the main annoyance appears: It's rather slow, with a good second between the click on the tile and it inverting. As it's written in Basic, the programmer could have compiled it for more speed.

When you manage to complete a game there's no big fanfare or message; in fact, you can't remove the last two pieces for that extra bit of gratification - instead it just starts up a new random game.

The menu options are quite extensive, allowing starting a new game, re-starting the same game, stepping back up to five moves and showing a move (not necessarily the best).

Then there are the cheat options, swapping two tiles, looking under a piece or actually altering a stack. Personally, I can do without these; I prefer to fail than cheat.

You can save your position at any time, and have sound effects or music playing. The sound effects include little phrases like "So you're to cheat?" while the music is a vaguely oriental and not too obtrusive soundtracker piece.

This is a nice little program, and I think I'll just have another quick game.

Steve Turnbull