Chessmaster

"Mentor, why must you turn my PS2 into a house of lies?!"

Nowadays, because chess programs are so readily available, the only way to properly judge new chess creations is to observe and evaluate the features they carry. In this respect, Chessmaster is both a resounding success and a miserable failure.

You start off with an account and an estimated rating and can change that rating based off which opponents you beat (the higher the rating your defeated opponent, the better for you). But Chessmaster doesn't merely offer an “opponent of X rating”, rather, your opponent's AI is programmed with certain inclinations about their openings, playing styles, and feelings towards certain pieces, ranging from “Vulnerable King”, “Likes Caro-Kann”, “Neglects Center”, “Over-possessive of Bishops”, up to the ever-amusing “Treats Queens like Rooks”. Furthermore, these AI are based off of real people (with bios mind you) from either mundane life or to history's greatest chessmasters and the Chessmaster program itself.

The standard chess program tweakables are of course included too, with a flexible time-counter, modifiable notation, announced opening choices, changeable chess sets (Mechanic and Gnome are a couple favorites) with unique, albeit fairly average musical tracks, a trait pervasive in Chessmaster, and a Battlefield where all the pieces are soldiers duking it out.

Chessmaster sports daily puzzles to solve that, while incredibly unrealistic of the actual position, evokes thought out of the player as to how to solve the crazy scenarios. The chess tutor programs starts off with simple concepts (e.g. moving pieces) to various terminologies used to identify important aspects of the game (e.g. “Holding the center”, fianchetto, en passant, IQPs), and concludes with a few annotated games personally commented upon by chessmaster Josh Waltzkin.

It even comes with an opening book, listing every opening imaginable, as well as an index of famous games. Unfortunately, neither the openings nor the games are annotated or commented upon at all, aside from a brief paragraph highlighting the game's climactic points. Also, the online feature, while an eye-grabber, is not at all what it's cracked up to be, as almost no one is ever playing Chessmaster online. You'd be much better of checking out any of the multitude of free chess web sites if you're searching for some human opposition.

However, these problems, while irritating, pale in comparison to the game's most glaring flaw: Chessmaster's mentor program. Let me be the first to tell you that this program will tell you nothing but horrible, materialist lies! Perfectly good moves are evaluated as inaccurate, and the program will ever too frequently dictate that another move choice that yields nothing but at most an extra pawn in exchange for a messy position is the preferable action. The “Solve for mate” option often completely misses the most expedient endgame moves (despite the Chessmaster AI playing the truly best move, which is the ironic part). But even more irking is that little to no effort is put into hiding this fact. After the opening, the analyzer speaks strictly in material or extremely simple strategic terms.

Chessmaster indeed contains a plethora of additional features that make it all the more appealing, but that it can't get right perhaps the most fundamental of chess program operations is a big letdown from a chess game which otherwise had quite a bit of potential.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/12/05