Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.

Ma Cheon Ru (Arcade)

 You're all familiar with Shanghai, right? The game about picking up pairs of Mahjong tiles out of a big pile in the right order? Ma Cheon Ru is based on a kind of variant of that. I can't find a name for this variant, though I think the most well-known games to feature it are the Dragon World series by IGS. 

 

How it works is that like in Shanghai, there is a specially-arranged pile of Mahjong tiles and you have to pick up all the tiles, with restrictions on which tiles can be picked up. Also like in Shanghai, the main restiction is that you can only pick up tiles that aren't covered by other tiles, and which have at least one of their horizontal sides untouched by other tiles, too. You aren't trying to match pairs to remove them from the game, though.

 

It's a pretty simple concept, but it's one that's kind of hard to explain in words. You have to match trios of identical tiles, but you don't have to pick them up together. Instead, you can hold up to six tiles in your hand (picking up a seventh that isn't the third tile of a set results in a game over), and tiles vanish from your hand when you've made a set of three. Get rid of all the tiles in the time limit and you finish the stage and go onto the next one. It's a genre I've only seen in arcade games, and pretty much all of them ramp up the difficulty very very quickly.

 

What makes Ma Cheon Ru stand out though, is the bonus stages (if you play it after reading this, I recommend going into the settings in MAME and setting it so they appear after every stage instead of after every third stage). There's nine different bonus stages that take the form of Tanto R-style minigames, with a wide variety of subject matter, like shooting parachutists, repeatedly punching a guy in the face, throwing objects at ugly people, and so on. They break things up pretty well, and you can get power ups for the main game if you score enough points in them. 

 

In fact, it seems like a lot more care and attention went into the bonus stages than the main game itself, and I wonder if the devs actually wanted to make a minigame compilation, but their publishers said that they needed to make a tile-matching puzzle game instead? We'll probably never know. Either way, I don't think this little subgenre is actually as fun as regular old vanilla Shanghai, but if you're going to play one of these games, Ma Cheon Ru at least has some mildly amusing bonus stages in its favour.