Oh cool, there hasn’t been an Atari Lynx game in Retro Roulette yet! I’ll just pop this game in and…wait a second.
It’s sealed?! What the hell? This presents a small conundrum – do I dare break what some consider a cardinal sin of game collecting? Do I have the nerve to tear off this shrink wrap that’s been there for over 25 years, just so I can write about the game inside for a blog? You bet I do.
To be fair, I did double check to confirm that I wasn’t making a huge mistake, but as it turns out, being sealed adds surprisingly little to a Lynx game’s value:
I’m not ever that lucky. Apparently there are more sealed copies sold online every year than there are complete ones, so if anything, I’ve created a real rarity by opening this. That’s how that works, right?
As for the game itself, it resembles mahjong at first glance, but it’s actually a rather unique puzzle game. You have a set of 72 stones, each with one of 6 shapes and 6 colors (so 2 of each combination), and your goal is to place as many of them as you can on a 96-square grid so that each tile is adjacent to others that match either its color, its symbol, or both. It stars out fairly simply, but eventually gets quite complicated. There are a handful of other specific rules about placement, though the game will remind you whenever you try to do something you can’t:
That’s pretty much it – there are a handful of different modes, including a pass-and-play co-op mode and a ‘tournament’ mode, but the core gameplay is pretty much always the same. Also, sometimes your cat shows up and tries to help, but is very unhelpful:
Ishido was released on a couple of other consoles as well, and while the in-game style is always distinctly Asian inspired, the cover art is sometimes another story. As noted above, the Lynx version features some sort of…Amazon, I think? That’s rather inexplicable. By contrast, here’s what the Genesis version looks like:
At least they picked the correct problematic stereotype, I guess. The really weird one, though, is the Game Boy version:
I don’t think these guys knew where Stonehenge was! That just raises further questions.
I honestly quite enjoyed Ishido – I could never quite wrap my head around how to not screw myself out of placing every tile (the highest I could get to was 61/72), but it was always fun to try, fail, and sort of realized where you messed up. I definitely have much to learn in the Way of Stones. If you enjoy challenging puzzle games and have any of the above consoles, it’s not a bad pickup.
The Lynx is a pretty cool console – it was the first handheld with a color screen (beating the Game Gear by over a year), and it has a rather ingenious control setup where the screen can be flipped if you’d prefer to have the D-pad in your right hand. Despite all the bells and whistles, it never really took off – one big reason for that is there were just 74 games released in its 6+ years of existence – that’s less than one per month! Even though one of those games was Chip’s Challenge, it just wasn’t enough to get people to buy in.
Next week’s Retro Roulette is another board game-esque release, although it’s much weirder and less culturally confused than this one. I think. See you then?