19 out of 20 people found this review helpful.
Best all around chess program
Date of Review: Jan 17, 2005
The Bottom Line: Worth the money, the interactive lessons are worth the price alone. A few glitches, but overall a great program.
Whether you are new to chess or a seasoned veteran, Chessmaster 10th edition has something for everyone. Chess is the oldest game known to man: some believe dated back to Egyptian times. The object of the game is to 'checkmate' your opponents king. The two sides use there respective armies to accomplish this.
Graphically stunning, and simple to use, Chessmaster can improve your game. The 10th Edition features, rated and unrated play, you can play online for free with other owners, and the animated/interactive lessons will improve your play. The animated lessons make this game worth the 30 bucks. You can start at square one, learning the board and how the pieces move or you can learn tactics, and strategy with either IM Josh Waztkin of GM Larry Christiansen.
There are even whimsical animated boards for the kids. If you have owned any of the older versions, don't be fooled. The 10th edition is a complete overhaul, and looks and feels nothing like the older versions.
There are dozens of different computer personalities to play, and the nice thing, compared to other chess programs I have tried is that Chessmaster plays like a human, making the game much more fun to play. The lower rated personalities play bad, while even GM Christiansen lost a few games to Chessmaster at it's toughest setting.
The great thing is it's versatility, as I said before, this program can teach your children to play, and it can challenge even the strongest players. There is a database program with 500,000 games. You can look up games by opening classification, player names, dates, or set up a position and search the database to see if it's been played in a game before. Chessmaster (CMX) can analyze your games and point out mistakes. In training mode there are many features to help you learn. The blunder alert will notify you of a possible bad move, and will tell you why it is bad. The program will point out hanging pieces, pins, skewers est.
The program is easy to learn, and pleasing to the eye. Another nice thing is that there are dozens of chess sets to choose from, and many more you can download online. With online play you can earn a rating, and see how you compare to others. All your online games are stored at the CMX website in PGN format, you can view and analyze them anytime, as well as look up an opponents game to study, or to see what openings they like to play est.
The board and pieces are hard to describe, because there are too many to choose from. You can choose the Staunton pieces, which have been the standard now for over 200 years, or you can choose from a myriad of Egyptian, Irish, Ceramic, Fantasy, or Medieval sets. The boards are tied to the sets, each set has it's own board. The board is totally controllable. You can shrink it, expand it, tilt it, rotate it…whatever you want. There are a myriad of windows you can open to get more information as well. The Game Status window shows you you're time, and moves as well as a picture of your opponent…and you can add your own picture as well. You have windows that show you what the computer is thinking, captured pieces, the three best moves for the current position; as well as the previously mentioned 'Teaching' mode, that will display, on the board, pieces left hanging, squares under attack, pins, skewers, weak squares est. All the windows are fully adjustable. I only open the Game status window when I play, so I can make the game board as big as possible.
You can choose from 3d sets, or the old fashioned flat 2d sets. Also, the American version of the game comes with a set of 3d glasses, because any of the 3d sets can be displayed in real 3d, and it really works! I don't use them, because I wear glasses, and the cheap 3d glasses are hard to wear over them. If you do buy the game, you will want to register it to play online, (which is free) and get the newest patches that have been released. Online play is fun, but the community is rather small at this point. There are usually no more the 20 to 40 players online at anytime, but finding a game is never a problem. As mentioned earlier, if you want to learn how to play, this is the program to buy.
The tutorials are simply the best. The computer will move the pieces on the board as a real voice talks to you and explains the position. The tutorials also use arrows to point things out as well as highlighting squares and rows on the board. Many of the tutorials have multiple choice answers, or it will ask you to find the solution and move the correct piece. If you are wrong it will let you try again. The interactivity of these lessons makes them fun to play through, and immensely useful as a learning tool.
However there are a few problems...
1) You need to insert the cd EVERY time you play...although there is suppose to be a patch released soon to fix this.
2) There are still a number of issues with online play. Although I don't have any problems, there are numerous complaints on the Chessmaster forums of connection problems, chat windows not working, games dropping out est.
3) A lot of the earlier problems with the game were fixed in the 1.02 patch, so if you buy the game, download and install this from the Chessmaster website before playing.
This is the best program out there as far as chess goes. This program would suite anyone from rank beginner right up to a Class A or even expert player. There is another Chess program called Fritz that is used by more 'serious' players. Generally for it's better analysis, but it is less user friendly, and only offers a few sets. It's not nearly as nice looking or as full featured as CMX.
Chessmaster would have earned 5 stars, but the online bugs need to be addressed first and a stronger analysis feature for the more serious players would be needed.
Update: (4/5/2005) The online feature has had some serious problems as of late. Ubi seems to be in no hurry to fix them. Ratings are messed up. There are persistant storage problems, so games are not counted, and/or stored. As a result users are dropping off, and you rarely find more than 20 or 30 players online now. If you can connect, your games more than likely will not be saved or counted toward your rating. Numerous users have been complaining but Ubi doesn't seem to care. As a result I have given up on the online feature. The program still works fine otherwise, but if you are looking for online play, I highly suggest you look elsewhere. As a result of this I am downgrading my rating to 3 stars.
