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Addiction at a great price

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: June 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When it comes to playing video games I have always been more of an action/sports fanatic...so why am I addicted to Chessmaster? I have never really played the game of chess before but I've always wondered what the big deal was about it, so after seeing this game advertised at a great price I decided to give it a chance. I'm glad I did!

This game has been outstanding for me as a beginner. It includes a complete "chess school" (do they actually have those??) feature that I am hooked on. After only a few lessons, I started to feel like I had inside knowledge on how to win at this game. The tutorial is thorough yet easy to understand. The different aspects of the game are broken down into small sections, and after a brief explanation of each one you are given a series of exercises that aid tremendously in the learning process (a la the old "doing is better than seeing" method). It is well-designed and, actually, fun. The chess lessons cover all levels of play and includes instruction from several grand wizards (or whatever they are called!) , so even advanced players will learn a lot from this feature.

Aside from being a great learning tool, it is the wide variety of gameplay options that makes Chessmaster such a great value. Ranked games, online play, and Puzzle of the Day are just a few of the features that are included. There are 150 different computer opponents, which is the largest number I have seen in a game of any type. It might not compare to the number of players online, but it still feels good when you beat someone and see your rating climb. Aside from twenty different sets of chess pieces, there is also a 3D battle chess mode that gives the game a little more action. I believe it could have been enhanced a bit, but it is still fun to watch.

With so many features included I have barely even cracked into this game. I am hooked on it and you just can't beat the price, which is less than most chess sets cost. I highly recommend it. Great for rainy days!

Checkmate! This is a Chessmasterpiece!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: June 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is actually designed to make you a CHESSMASTER YOURSELF! I was interested in the teaching prospects for this game and I was anxious to see what the PS2 would give us in the way of Chess. In just two days of playing this game, I find myself, at 36 years old, addicted to Chess again. It comes with a "Chess School" that is presented verbally and with text for students at any level including very well presented tutorials, drills, exams, commentaries on famous games,and puzzles to keep you or make you sharp! In the non rated game options there are several teaching and mentoring tools with and a cool "game analysis" feature visually animates "better" moves I could have made during the game. This is just the tip of the iceburg!

Once you feel like you are ready to take on the ChessWorld there are rated games and your rating is upgraded or downgraded depending on the outcome of games with some of the 150+ opponents with diverse playing styles and strengths you play against! Championship tournaments at different skill levels await players who love to compete. Your drill records, player rating, opponents defeated, and more all chronicled for you as a player!

There are 20 impressive, beautifully designed 3D chess sets ! Each with background, music, and distinct themes! One word of advice: get familiar with each piece so you don't mistake a bishop for queen and so forth between sets. There is even Fantasy Battle chess with animated action!

If you love Chess, truly want to be a "master" and own a PS2 get this game!

Great for learning chess, so-so graphics

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: August 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

In a world where Harry Potter is king, and Wizard's Chess captured the hearts of millions, it's no surprise that another animated chess game - Chessmaster - has hit the market.

The game has quite a collection of training systems - tutorials, exams, historic games, classic openings. But I went diving right for the fantasy chess, with its animation.

You can choose from the orcs or the humans, white or black. Each side has six leaders to choose from - each with his own style of play. You can play single player, two player or just watch. The play has a variety of backgrounds - stone walls, desert and more.

As much as I used to love Battle Chess and enjoy playing it, this version really wasn't that great. The fights were all extremely simple. While you could spin around the board, you couldn't zoom in or out, and often the not-great graphics made it hard to tell exactly which unit was which. The game played was a good one, but the graphics and angles made me quit back out to the regular game.

The main chess game has a variety of boards and piece styles as well. Each 'theme' has its own pieces, board, background, music. While I enjoyed the Halloween and gnome sets, again they were hard to use and fuzzy at best. I settled on the Irish wood set and got going.

The gameplay again was great, and the tutorials, lessons and examples really help you learn at your own pace and make solid progress. Since that's really what the game is about, I highly recommend you choose a nice, simple chess layout - maybe even going for the 2-D symbol set. Don't fool with the fancy backgrounds - just concentrate on the wealth of information the game offers as far as learning the game. There's even an online option for when you've gotten your feet wet and are ready for a human challenger.

Recommended for anyone wanting to learn the game of chess, or hone their skills.

Excellent, but....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is awesome. But also, a bit frustrating.
The plethora of opponenets is great and the computer AI is tweaked to perfection but there are some things that make this game a bit annoying. One of these things is that the boards are a tad bit small. It is very hard to see your pieces unless you are either squinting or have your nose touching the screen. Also, I've found that most of the boards are hard to play with by the way the pieces are designed, so most of the time i'm playing on the simple figurine style. And last but not least, the chess battlefield sucks. I really dont need to explain it, it sucks. Yeah sure the pieces slay eachother, but when you cant remember if that guy is your bishop or your queen, it creates a problem.

But lets get back to the pros shall we?

I love how you have a rating, especially if you're a beginner because it makes it very simple to find a reasonable opponent, not some program that is going to whoop you in about ten moves. Also I like the tournaments. They're cool because you can choose them on what type of player you are, such as a defensive player, or a trader.

Overall the Pros outweigh the Cons by a landslide. Great game, great price... This is a must have for any chess player; master or beginner.

Entertaining but Horribly Put Together

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Some group of computer designers decided to make a bunch of money and spent a minimal amount of time sloppily compiling this program to market because they knew people with PS2's who liked chess would buy it.

That said, it's actually well worth the 10 bucks you can buy it for now, especially if you are a mid-level player or beginner.

Good things about the game:

Excellent tutorials. The Josh Waitzkin annotated games are awesome and instructional. The famous game library is cool. The Pandolfini chess rating exam is highly entertaining (though I think you can find it on the web now for free). The number of potential opponents and their different styles is entertaining. You'll get better playing this game, which is what it's good for.

Bad things:

This game was lazily and sloppily compiled. The controls are totally unintuitive and not user friendly. As far as I can tell, you can't even hit a button to return to move one of a game when analyzing it. You have to slowly go from move 70 back to 1 move by move. The game analysis may seem impressive at first, but it's totally flawed. You can't follow it easily because the computer starts talking before its moved all the pieces back to their starting positions- its totally frustrating. Also, the computer will often not finish announcing your opponents move, so if you are playing over your own board in a timed game, you may not even realize it's your turn while your clock is ticking.

Probably the most frustrating thing about this game is the time controls. The computer opponents are rated, but as far as I know, the given rating is only accurate if you play at the time-wastingly plodding tournement time of 40 moves in 120 minutes. I don't have time to do this. So if you pick an opponent with a 1600 rating, he will not play at 1600 unless you want to spend 6 hours playing one game of chess. So, you'll have a lot of people claiming to beat a really high level chess personality because they were using faster time controls. Subtract about 50 from the actual rating. To test this, there are a couple of personalities who move instantly no matter what time control you set it on- Max and Vlad for intermediate players. For those who don't have all day to play one game, these players are fun to play against. Max will move instanty no matter what time constraints he is on. But if you set him to 40/120 he will ALWAYS beat himself at 40/60. If you set Max at 40/120 he will beat higher ranked players playing at 40/80. This is really stupid I think. Another problem is that the computer sees all tactics no matter what level you put it on. This is unhumanlike. It might see a complex 6 move mating attack at a low 1300 level while the same personality will hang a piece. Very silly. The computer can't discern a brilliant and hard to see move from a an obvious one. Also, the graphics are virtually worthless. I can only play using the 2-d figurines. I usually play over my own board. The battle-chess mode is literally unplayable. You can't even see what piece you're moving. I just can't even believe that someone marketed this game before improving upon this. Its just a money making scheme.

Overall:

This is fun, not user-friendly, poorly and quickly constructed to make money for UBISOFT, but entertaining nonetheless. However, to improve and make the use of your time its better to have a computer opponent who moves quicker, and analyses positions better such as Fritz. The tutorials alone are worth the current price. You can pick this up for cheap at any gamestop store or here on Amazon. But you can also get a version of Fritz at Target for 10 bucks which is better in many ways. I say get this game mainly for the tutorials and play Fritz for the chess.

Ridiculous amount of bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: April 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game could be a 5 star, if it worked properly. I've only had the game one month and I've found several bugs in it. I'm a computer programmer and if my work had this many errors in it, I'd be out of a job.

If you win a match within the time limit in 'Rated Game', half the time it'll declare your victory a 'Stalemate'. This has happened probably a dozen times.

Also, it sometimes overwrites your save files. I had a profile with a 4-0 record and this morning it was overwritten. I recreated it, won a game and saved it. Thanks to another 'stalemate' that I didn't deserve, I rebooted after a 2nd game. I come back and my new profile with 1 victory saved has been overwritten again.

If you love chess, try to get this game used at GameStop or some other used game store. But be warned. It has more bugs in it than Windows 2000.

You really do learn, but...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game on New Year's day 2005 as part of my resolution to learn to play chess. I read all the review and weighed the good and the bad, and bought the game new at a video store.

The good thing about the game is that you really do learn to play chess. From the main menu you click on "tutorial" and then you are directed through screen after screen which explains each chess piece in detail, teaching you the legal moves for each piece. After a while I got a little impatient and went to the Battle Chess when I hadn't finished the tutorial, but after 2 moves I got my (...)kicked so I'm back in the chess school!

The bad thing is that this game is hopelessly boring. I have to admit that I thought the game would be like the front cover of the disc case but you will see nothing like that. While you're going through the tutorial, low-register easy listening music plays in the background while a male voice reads from the instructions on the screen. Also, what the other reviewers said about the mini chess board is true. I thought it wouldn't matter to me since I have a large TV screen but it's set up so that half the screen is the chess board, the other half is taken up by the on-screen instructions. Why couldn't they put the instructions as a moving caption below? In the battle chess, you can barely see the pieces -- as if the figures are extremely fuzzy and once they start moving, you don't know which figure corresponds to what chess piece.

This being said, I would still recommmend this if your goal is to have an intelligent and intimate knowledge of the game. You learn different strategies, how to gain a holistic perspective of the board and it is easy to navigate. I admit I've only done the tutorial and Battle Chess so far, and I might even buy that cartoony looking chess game designed for kids (Fritz and something?) just to make it a bit more fun for me to play. There is no doubt that you will learn, but like me, you may fall asleep a few times in the process!

Dissappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am really very disappointed at the poor thought that went into designing this game. I was really looking forward to it, having for many years owned Chessmaster II for the Playstation One. I was dismayed to discover that in many ways the Playstation 2 version is a step backwards. The graphics and interface of the Playstation One version are far more user friendly, with many more options for customization.

The most irritating thing about Chessmaster for Playstation 2 is the size of the chess board, which is tiny. This means you have to strain your eyes to make out the pieces, which all look alike - unless of course you like sitting 10cm in front of the screen, which rather defeats the object of using a game console rather than a PC. It is as though the designers thought of everything except the one thing that really matters: the comfort of the viewer. I find myself using the 2D display, ignoring all the 3D options, simply because it is easier to make out the pieces, but even on the 2D display they are uncomfortably small.

What's so frustrating is how much space is pointlessly wasted, which means that the chess board could easily have been twice as big if only the designers had given the matter of viewer comfort some thought. For example, the designers included displays of the pieces that have been captured. Now how pointless is that! As if it isn't obvious which pieces have been captured simply by looking at the board.

The overall interface isn't much to shout about either. For example, you might have thought that taking back a move would be possible at the touch of a button. But no, you have to bring up a separate menu, scroll down it and only then can you take back your move. There is no way to reset a game to the start, so analyzing finished games can only be done by taking back each move (which means bringing a new menu up each time, remember). If it was a rated game, the computer won't let you take back moves even when the game is finished.

Certain preferences, such as your preferred time controls, do not appear to save, which means that you have to reset them each time you load the game. Don't even get me started on the controls for playing through master games or browsing the list of opponents, which are so confusing and unintuitive it is almost a joke.

Of course, at the end of the day chess is chess, and once you get used to the irritatingly small board and clunky interface then this game is obviously enjoyable if you enjoy chess. But it is so frustrating that this game could have been so much better, if only a small amount of thought had been given to addressing the issues above.

Chessmaster Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 14
Date: June 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I had become addicted to the Chessmaster for the PC so when I heard the new one was coming out for PS2 - I pre-ordered it. The day it came I walked right in and started playing. Let me just say I was highly disappointed. The graphics compared ot the PC version are not that impressive and there weren't a whole lot of options for different boards, pieces, etc. And the so-called "Battlefield Chess" leaves a lot to be desired. ....

king of games

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: November 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

this game is pathetic.I had chessmaster 2 for ps1 and it was much better (larger chessboards +actual controls)do not buy this mini screen squinter!now you know K.G. out

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