Mahjong has been around for ages. What started as a real tile based game moved over to the digital age way back in early versions of Windows. I remember firing it up back in Windows 3.1 to kill time. Full back then, still fun now. But Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom just isn’t that fun.

If you’ve never played mahjong-solitaire, I’ll break it down for you. You need to match like tiles on the game board by number and symbol. Ancient Wisdom expands on this a bit with a few different game modes. You have your basic Infinity mode, where you pick from one of 100 layouts and go off matching tiles until you clear the board. Ancient Tales gives you odd, annoying cutscene tales during each of the 10 rounds of play. Motion mode is a nice twist on the classic. You start off with a set layout of tiles while a stream of random tiles comes in from the bottom of the screen. You need to match them up before they circle back and hit the top right corner.

Here’s where my problems start with the game. The presentation isn’t done very well at all. The background graphics are bland and I frequently had trouble reading the in-game text, even on my 50″ 1080p HDTV. The sounds are even worse, with Ancient Tales voiceovers sounding like they were recorded in someone’s bathroom.

The controls leave a lot to be desired. You use the left thumbstick or d-pad to move a mouse cursor around the screen to the select the tiles, which is extremely cumbersome. The cursor does not snap onto a tile when you’re close either, so trying to make a quick move in a timed game gets tricky. It almost feels like the game was designed for the PC and just ported over to the PS3 last minute.

Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom does have an online multiplayer component, but after 20 tries over multiple days, I was unable to find an opponent.

At $10, I cannot recommend picking this one up. Go find a free version of Mahjong online for your PC and use the money in your PSN wallet for something else.

Overall: 4 out of 10

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