Kasparov Chessmate Review

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(More customer reviews)If you rate this game (or any game on amazon.com), it tells you to rate it based on 'How much fun is this game?'. For me, chess programs have been quite an exercise in frustration. So far, I have found Kasparov to be pleasantly enjoyable, even though I know that it lacks some of the incredible features (analysis, play strength, graphics) of the heavy hitters on the market (CM9000, Fritz 8).
Instead of writing a negative review about this, allow me to take a moment to explain why I decided to buy Kasparov Chessmate. But let me first confess that I am little better than a wood pusher (or, if you would prefer... a patzer). That means that although I know the rules, and am familiar with basic tactics and can recognize a couple openings by name, I am not a strong player. I have no rating... but believe I am class E in strength. Over the last 9 months, my chess studies/purchases/results have included:
- Chess for Dummies (still working on finishing up the last few chapters... but it introduced me to tactics)
- Play Winning Chess (just bought last week - and am very pleased with it)
- Chessmaster 9000 (gave it away to a good friend, but will be buying again - but only for it's training material)
- Fritz 8 (for chess analysis and playchess.com chess server)
- ChessTiger for my palm (which beats me 99% at it's training level 3 playing with it's book)
- play and lose to my Dad regularly in online and e-mail chess(who is the reason why I continue to play)
- Polgar's 5334 chess problems (a great big book that I enjoy)
- am loosely rated around 1200 on yahoo chess
Why did I buy Kasparov? For starters, Chessmaster 9000 confounded me. I would struggle and lose against very poorly ranked players. I don't think chessmaster 9000 has quite figured out how to reduce it's strength at it's weaker/weakest levels. It either makes really good moves, or really dumb moves. [I believe that it still has a few issues with XP. They have not released any patches/updates in over 9 months.] This is where Kasparov seems to shine. When I downloaded the trial version of Kasparov to try it out for an hour, I discovered that it has players ranked down to elo 500. Although I haven't had enough time to seriously try it out since I bought it (midnight last night at WalMart), I am pleased to announce that I wasn't trounced on the lowest level (elo 500) of Kasparov on my Palm - and I can tell you that Kasparov on my palm was not throwing completely random/stupid moves at me as Chess Tiger will tend to do in Training level 1 (what it claims is elo 1000). I feel like I actually 'met my match' playing Kasparov on my Palm.
I also spent sometime going through the training last night before falling asleep and this morning. It could be better, but it does a reasonable job of explaining how pieces move, and what is checkmate. I wish that they would have placed middle-game tactics before openings (it gives you about a dozen examples of common open games played out to about a dozen turns (24 ply) - without any variations). I won't be able to give an adequate evaluation of the training until I complete it.
I'm not saying Kasparov is better than Chess Tiger on the palm (no analysis, strength of play, etc). But I feel that at my weaker level of play, I have possibly found a program that isn't playing 'stupid moves', but isn't trouncing me either. If you can stand losing occasionally (especially against Fritz in 'friend mode') and analyze your failures, that's great - and we often learn by losing. But it sure is nice to win once in a while.
I've given Kasparov 4 stars because of it's quality of weaker play (which may - in fact - be it's greatest selling point to the average consumer), and for the Palm version of the software. For me, it was a bargain because I got two chess programs for the price of one (one for my pc, and one for my palm). As I take more time to evaluate the game (and if I notice improvement in my play) I will be sure to post additional comments.
Keep in mind - Kasparov is aimed at the general consumer market. Anyone serious about chess programs is already aware of Fritz/Chessbase and Chessmaster 9000. This program is not better than those for reasons already stated. But I will confess, that so far I have enjoyed playing Kasparov chess - and hence it earns 4 stars on the merit that 'I had fun'. If you want to make money selling chess software to the masses, then you want to offer a game that is fun and challenging. If, and when, I win the 'bronze level' tournament in Kasparov, I'll be back to give additional feedback.

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Deep Rybka 3 World Chess Champion for Multiprocessor PC Review

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(More customer reviews)Rybka has been by far the strongest and the most efficient computer chess engine since it came out a few years ago. The new version 3 reaches such high ILO ratings that practically leaves everything and everyone else in the dust.
I was at first intimidated by Rybka's strength. After all, does a 1000-rated player really need a 3000+ rated program that can easily beat Kasparov? After trying a few other programs including ChessMaster, however, I decided that their erratic position analysis was simply too unreliable and finally took the plunge.
The new Rybka 3 came out in August with a new front-end application, Aquarium, designed specifically for it. Unfortunately, a quick web search reveals wide-spread user discontent about the buggy nature of this new software. Therefore, I chose to go with the tried-and-true Chessbase version.
The installation went smoothly without a hitch. The Chessbase front-end runs fairly stable but comes without some of the fancy features of ChessMaster. What I really wants is to do position analysis quickly and reliably, however, and here, Rybka truly shines. It reaches a stable, consistent and trustworthy evaluation at a depth of 14 to 15. It is like having god on your side to ask for advise at every turn.
I run Deep (i.e. the multi-processor version) Rybka with Windows Vista 64 on an Intel Q9450 quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM. It generally takes around a minute to evaluate 10-30 million positions and reach the useful depth of 14. The only time the recommendations look a little suspect is during the opening, but this is largely due to the fact that I did not purchase the Rybka book, which is sold separately.
In all, there is no guarantee that Rybka will improve the user's chess skill, but no computer program can really make that claim anyway. What it is guaranteed to do is to give the users reliable position evaluation in real time. To me, therefore, it takes away most of the confusion and frustration in studying chess. I am truly happy with the purchase.


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Lego Chess Review

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(More customer reviews)This chess game does work on Windows XP SP2, but you have to download a patch from the software developer to get it to work. You can download the patch at:
(......)
When you first install the game on XP SP2, it does not recognize that the CD is in the computer and it keeps asking for it. The patch eliminates this error. It has good 3D graphics and is not violent like other chess games. My son likes battle chess, but its so small on a modern PC and the audio doesn't work. This lego chess game is a good beginners chess set with fun graphics kids will like.
It's a great value at just under (....) with shipping.

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Chessmaster 9000 Review

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(More customer reviews)Chessmaster 9000 has a lot of things going for it. To start with, the chess engine itself ("The King") is very strong, and on its highest setting, it will beat all but the very best players. It is quite flexible, and comes with hundreds of pre-set personalities that range from the lowliest novice to the juggernaut grandmaster. It also allows you to create custom personalities with a fair amount of detail, including their overall strength, preference for material or positional play, how they value the pieces with respect to one another, and so on. Your options for controlling the games are also quite sufficient, with plenty of different time controls available, and the ability to make the controls different for white and black.
The best part of CM9000, though, is the wealth of tutorials and practice drills that are built into it, which cover an array of chess topics and will teach the beginning player a great deal. I especially enjoyed the material contributed by IM Josh Waitzkin, including a dozen of his games that he gives a full running commentary for, an endgame course illustrating strategies for how to use the different pieces to full advantage in the endgame, and a course on the psychology of competition which was very interesting even for someone like me, who's never played chess competitively. I have already learned a lot about chess theory from going through these tutorials, and I've not even been through half of them yet.
CM9000's first weak point is the interface. Run the game at a low to medium resolution and the various windows will soon be taking up way too much valuable real estate on the screen. If you use a fixed view or 3D chess board, the Captured Pieces window is particularly offensive, taking a ludicrous amount of space to show the large piece graphics with plenty of space between them. There are so many improvements that could be made to the interface, and most of them would be extremely simple to implement.
The graphics are not particularly good. There are numerous chess sets available, but many of the options are custom sets that take more time to get used to than they're worth, and even some of the more straightforward designs tend to blend into one another and wrench your eye when they're actually placed on the chessboard. The piece designs and textures could have been much better. Furthermore, the 3D view doesn't run very smoothly on older machines, even with 3D acceleration. This would be acceptable for a graphically complex game, but even a novice programmer should be able to display a 3D chessboard efficiently on a Pentium III-500. In the tutorial mode, using the fixed view boards, I've noticed the pieces sometimes scale strangely, getting smaller and then larger as they move. There are all kinds of little quirks like this. The bottom line is that while the game seems to have lots of graphical options, most of them are worthless. Stick with the simple 2D boards.
Finally, the program has crashed on me way too often for comfort. It crashes sometimes when I switch from one room to another, particularly if I hadn't been to that room before. It crashes occasionally when I try to switch from 2D to 3D. Once in awhile it will crash at the end of a game analysis. This is very irritating. I am not using an unsupported OS or hardware, and I've installed the latest patch, so I don't know what the problem is. And that brings me to another point: non-support of Windows 2000. Other reviews say it does run on Win2K, but the fact that UbiSoft won't support it is absurd. Speaking from a game programmer's perspective, this should not be a big issue with a program like this one.
It would have been nice to have some other modes of play available, since there are a ton of chess variants out there that are fun to play, but CM9000 doesn't support any of them. (You can play blindfold chess, but I have enough trouble memorizing a position, much less a whole bloody game!) I realize that this might introduce some difficulty in getting the chess engine to play the variants well, but I'd be happy just having the options there, even if the computer doesn't play them to full grandmaster standard. At least throw some of them in for online play against other humans.
So, the bottom line: Chessmaster 9000 is a decent program, worth the price of admission for its tutorials alone, much less its strength of play, but it does have a number of flaws that stand in the way of it being a much better program.

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Chessmaster 9000 places you where you must master one of history's great challenges -- the age-old game of chess!Avoid common mistakes with Blunder AlertSpeed up the action in Speed Chess modeYou are invited to test your brain by mastering history's greatest game!

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