The Chessmaster is a game where the player has the chance to play against the CPU controlled Chessmaster at a standard game of chess. To play the game the player must pick up the chess pieces with there hand cursor and place it in the desired location, within the rules a standard chess game. There are 16 different difficulty levels that includes 2 beginner levels, 13 standard levels (ranging from an average of 5 seconds to 4.5 minutes per shot depending on level), and a infinite level that will keep thinking of a shot until a perfect shot can be made or it is forced to move. There is also a teaching mode that shows the player all the possible moves with the selected piece. Two players can play each other with two controllers and there is also an option of letting the Chessmaster play itself.
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Chess is Chess, we all know what it is. But the question we are here to answer is how well did the developers translate the Chess experience to Game Boy?
The Chessmaster has an excellent array of options to taylor the experience to your liking. Here is a selection of notable options:
- Save and load functionality
- Customizable board orientation
- Multiple difficulty settings
- A move timer function
- 2 Player functionality
- Reverse move functionality
- A great Tutorial Mode for newcomers
- A decent hint system
There are a lot more options, too. It's basically the best licensed version of Chess on the Game Boy you are going to get.
But what I don't like about it is the SFX and the Graphics. Each time you move and your opponent moves, there is this horrible .WAV file that playes out. It can get very annoying so I tend to play the game with no volume.
The graphics are extremely bland and pretty rough around the edges.
You control a hand that hovers over the board and picks up and moves pieces on A press and with the Dpad respectively. The point and click style UI works well enough. It's a little clunky but playing Chess with Dpad (and not a mouse) was never going to be perfect.
One addition that is sorely missing is the ability to put a piece back down quickly by pressing the B button or something. I often pick up a piece, think about my options for while and forget where the piece used to be. Putting it back in its original location can be a pain at times.
The AI is fairly good. It's not going to blow your socks off but it gets the job done for the Game Boy. At harder difficulties there is significant wait time while the AI does its best to out play you. So it's best to play on the GBC and take advantage of the better processing speed, but even then, the wait times can be too long on harder difficulties.
The Chessmaster is the best Chess experience in the licensed catalogue. I ended up making a graphics modification hack for this game because it's overall excellent code wise but is let down in the graphics department. My own hack (titled "Super Chess Master") can be found on my website and swaps out all the pieces for Nintendo characters. A link to my website can be found on my Profile, if you are keen to check it out.
I couldn't fix the horrible SFX but hey, you can't win every game.