Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe's guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo's download service. Written by Sam C Gittins.

This weeks release admittedly isn't the most exciting unless you happen to be overly enthusiastic about tile-matching. Anyway enough from me and on with the game!

Available for download this week we have...

• Shanghai II : The Dragon's Eye

Points: 800
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Activision
Released: 1989
System: Megadrive

The ancient art of tile matching has been around for some time now with the first games being some decades old and first garnering success on PC's at the time; indeed they were so successful that Activision � in their infinite/lucrative wisdom - decided that because home consoles at the time were deemed powerful enough to recreate the backgrounds and tile-sets faithfully that porting the game across would be viable.

And to give the company credit they were half-right because from a visual standpoint the game did look rather reasonable for a port with all the various backgrounds and tile-sets making the transition across very well. What didn't make the leap however was the fluidity in which the original PC counterpart played thanks to its responsive control-scheme achieved through use of the humble mouse.

It's simply not possible to get that same level of precision that you can from a cursor-driven device on a d-pad; even with the sensitivity set to full there is still a noticeable lag which slows a game like this down to a crawl. And that's only the start of it because there is also a delay between matching tiles and them disappearing which doesn't help matters at all.

Helping to break things up a bit there is a two-player mode which is where the 'Dragon's Eye' bit comes into play; you are given a role each one is the Dragon Slayer and the other is the Dragon Master, the former has to 'slay' the dragon by clearing a small board with a hand of only six tiles while the latter must 'awaken' the dragon by filling the board from a hand of only three tiles. It's a decent enough twist but it basically ends up playing like a game of Solitaire and an unresponsive one at that.

Quite honestly the game mechanics themselves are absolutely fine but the inadequacies of the d-pad controller when utilised in a game like this render it virtually unplayable. You're quite honestly better off either waiting for the recently release in Japan Wiiware version from Sunsoft to be released over here or just buying it for the PC because a mouse-like control scheme is a must for this game, it's just not worth it otherwise.

Verdict : Tile-matching turned traumatic.

That's it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!

Sam Gittins
[email protected]

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