Old Man Hunter: Mahjong.

Kenji Eno. Living proof as the song lyrics says, The drugs don't work. Either that or he was (is?) fundamentally insane.

He hand delivered 20 limited edition copies of Enemy Zero for the Dreamcast. For £1000 he did anyway. His mascot was a radish. I've seen it and I'm convinced D2, the Dreamcast edition, has a Deep Throat sequence in it. Don't ask because I won't explain.

I do get the impression that unlike the rest of the industry, who at the time were asking quite a lot of, "What do the kids really want?" Eno-san was saying "Sod the kids. I'll do what I want!" or more realistically, I'll do what I can get away with. A lot of his work has a hint of a curved ball. It is almost as if he was making fun of the world with his ideas and games. Or at least I hope he was. Nets at the ready boys. Do you know what I mean?

You see, can anyone offer a rational explanation for an RPG 2D shoot 'em up? Or that all time classic Wake up Nobonaga? How about todays conceptual mental circus, where even having played it, I can't quite see what any member of the Warp team was thinking. Well perhaps other than: "Hee Hee, I wonder if we can get away with this?"

A Super Hero, who is called Old Man Hunter, flies about saving young short-skirted traditional Anime styled Japanese school girls from dirty old men by playing and hopefully beating them at Mahjong.

O.K. Still with me? No - I don't know either.

I'm fairly confident the kids weren't begging for this. Least of all Japanese school girls. One question that always floats through my mind is this: Has any male in Japan, a male related to either the Anime or Video game industry ever actually met a Japanese school girl? I have and they bare not even a passing resemblance to the characters in these stories. I don't get it.

Of cause that was the least of my worries playing Old Man Hunter: Mahjong.

If we assume I cannot play mahjong this review is going to be considerably simpler. The story went something like this. A young cutesy Japanese school girl was tottering her way home through Shibuya-ku. How do I know it's Shibuya-ku in central Tokyo? The buildings have 109 written on them and that is where my wife is from. Anyway, she was tottering home and this dirty old man pops out and starts taking photographs of her. He then exposes himself to the girl. On seeing his, in Japanese chin-chin I guess, she whips out a torch, think Batman symbol, and flashes the Old Man Hunter signal onto the clouds. Old Man hunter then swoops in and fights the dirty old man - he then challenges him to a game of Mahjong.

...words fail me.

Was Warp making light of what was, and perhaps is, a serious issue in Japan? Young girls were frequently molested on trains and buses at this time. Yet from what I know, the girls weren't the dainty little flowers as depicted, waiting for some Superhero to save them. No indeed. Many girls armed themselves with 3" safety pins from their skirts and unleashed Japanese schoolgirl fury on the dirty old mens hands when they felt them. Japanese schoolgirl fury being something to avoid as a rule.

Was Warp showing its disgust and perhaps showing its solidarity with the girls? Was Warp trying to attract the female Japanese gamer? Or just perhaps drawing attention to the problem? What were they thinking and why do it like this? Yet the girls depicted in the game could well be accused by some as being the root of the actual problem. The skirts. The flashes of knickers. The long legs. Like I said, curved ball.

Perhaps it was to spark debate? I like to think it was something along the lines of: Yes, anime girls are cute to look at but abuse a real girl and you deserve a good thrashing. Or maybe that's just me.

I'd say this game was 50% import friendly, if and only if you know how to play Mahjong.

Not rare in Japan. Unseen outside of Japan.

3DO Kid.