Giveaway of the Day - Grand Master Chess III

In Brief

We got the original from Fly games back in 2008, from the look of this game, the basics are still the same, but they have improved the skins and added more functions. You can read the old comments HERE

Grandmaster Chess III

The game downloads to a 143Mb zipped file containing a read me and a dual activation and setup module. To newcomers this means just click on the wrapped set up file and select your installation path (if you wish the game to go to somewhere other than the default path). Once installed the game is automatically registered The installed games footprint is 407Mb in size (this is also around 30MB smaller than the last time we got this program). On starting the game It installs to:

C:\Games\Grand Master Chess III

The game plays okay on XP Pro with SP3 32 Bit, Vista Home Basic 64 bit and Win 7 Pro 64 bit, though I’ve only installed and opened up the game, not actually played the game.

No shortcut is installed to the desktop or the start men programs folder nor is there an uninstaller installed so to uninstall you just have to delete the installed folder.

Introduction

Grand Master Chess III will help to improve your chess skills and become a better tournament or casual player. You can either have friendly competitions against friends and family members or try solo mode against the computer. Listen to your own music as you play! An incredible level of detail and realistic chess figurines add to the gameplay experience. With a sophisticated hint system that shows several possible moves to help you learn, Grand Master Chess is an enjoyable experience for any chess player.

Reference accessed HERE 3rd March 2012

The Game

I’m not going to write a full review today, just describe what the game offers . We all know what Chess is; I’m no expert on chess so really can’t tell you whether the Grand Master mode lives up to it’s name. You’d need someone that’s at that level to confirm this. I’ve never really played chess regularily. I used to play with some friends many years ago (over 20), but we were all average players. The game looks well constructed with a load of board and pieces skins that enable you to change the look to a style you like. The game seems to be a reasonable chess game with six levels of difficulty ranging from Grandmaster down through hard, medium, easy adult, child and monkey modes. There is actually another one that’s user defined which allows you to define the number of moves forward, the amount of time you are allowed to move and a fixed time for the game.

You can also toggle off several visual effects such as shadows, reflections, buttons fade, moves animation etc, ad you can also toggle between full screen and windowed from the visual effects section.

As for audio, you can include any MP3′s you have stored on your computer. Just click on the sound Effects link and then the MP3 folder to browse for your music collection. You can also toggle off sound bites (pieces and the soundtrack if you wish). There is a speech mode available, but only via the CD version of this game. It looks like they have removed the speech to cut down on the already large size of this game

You can play the game in 2D or 3D and rotate the board from white to black etc. There are 17 board skins and 34 piece types to choose from.

You can choose to play Fischer rules if you wish.

There’s a preferences button that enables you to toggle the following:

!) … Think when Idle

… Randomize moves

… Use Quick Start

… Show Quick Tips

… Show intro

… Use Quick Save Slots

…Select Skill on new game.

There’s also a network option, with input for server IP, so i’m assuming this is a true online game not just local area networking. Which is very cool.

As with most computer based chess games you can undo moves if you want to cheat :lol:

Features

1) … Standard, Fisher Style and Blind game rules to choose from;
2) … Easy to use interface that includes highlights and button hints;
3) … Includes a collection of chess problems as well as a Problem Solver and a built in Problem Editor;
4) … More than 100 high quality chess piece/board skins;
5) … Includes a built-in mp3 player so you can play your own music while playing;
6) … Network mode lets you play with your friends.

Controls

• Mouse

System Requirements

- Windows 98/XP/Vista- 300 MHz CPU- 512 MB RAM- 700 MB Hard disk space- 1024×768 graphics card- DirectX compatible sound card

Conclusion

I’ll leave the conclusions to the players who profess to know more about chess. I’ve only ever been a casual player so cannot in all honesty give a true statement as to whether this game is good or not. To me it seems a decent game. I played the original on Grand Master and Hard and easily lost (but then I really didn’t think through the moves because I was really just trying to get a feel for the game). I seem to be able to hold my own when the difficulty is set to medium (that is, I’m holding my own), but I’ve not played this version yet, only the original.

(I got a copy of this last night , but wasn’t told which game was going to be posted until this morning when I got up 10 minutes before the giveaway was due).

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If todys game doesn’t take your fancy then check out the game discussion forums and the free games synopsis. We’ve posted a couple of thousand free games over the last three years, some of which are fantastic.

All of the major game distributors such as Steam, Impulse and GOG all have some sales with savings as good as 75% in some cases. There’s a free weekend for the game Payday: The Heist and 50% off if you decide to purchase it. Also there’s 50% off Saints Row the Third and 75% off Saints Row 2 and 50% off Two Worlds II and extras. Theirs also 75% off Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. GOG have sales on all of their Myst games and Gamersgate as usual have hundreds of games on sale, most notably, Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga for 75% off, Section 8 for 80% off and 95% off the 1C collection off 84 AAA games. You can get 75% off Wheelman from Gamestop.

You can check out all of the main distributors deals via the Didematic Site

There are some no strings attached freebies from Alawar and Realore (well you do have to install Alawars gamebox and register a free account over at Realore). You can get Flowery Vale a match three from alawar and Turtle Oddysey from Realore. The Alawar freebie is usually available for around a month (it’s already been available for three weeks or more) and the Realore game changes every Friday.

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Problems installing, activating and running today’s game:

If you have difficulty downloading or activating the game you can try again later or do one of the following – for example once downloaded when you click on the dual activation and set up file you may get the message “Failed to connect. Please try again later” Check to see if your internet explorer isn’t offline (thanks to MrSnoozles/Mike and GMMan for that fix). If the previous suggestion doesn’t work go check out previous comments from the last several weeks and look for comments from GMMan and Mike. They have also posted their possible fixes for this problem.

Mike suggests that you check to see if Internet Explorer is offline (even if you use firefox). If it is make sure that it’s online thn try again. I’ve always tried re-booting my modem and/or router with some success, though Mike has said that doing that does nothing. Still, it’s worth a try if all else fails.

If you are getting the black screen problem right click on the games executable and select properties then click on the compatibility mode and select the disable visual themes. This should fix the problem, if not try disabling the display scaling on higher dpi settings and disabling the desktop composition. You can also try compatibility modes for XP, epecially if the game is quite old.

Other fixes include changing your screen resolution, installing the latest direct X (remember that XP uses DX 9 or earlier only, Vista uses DX 10 or before and Win 7 DX11 or before). Also try updating your graphics drivers. The main two chip manufacturers are NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) both of which offer driver downloads for free. Just go to the respective manufactures home page and you’ll find a link to the driver download page. To find out which graphic card or graphics chip your computer uses type in Dxdiag in the search field (Vista or Win 7) or the run command (XP); this opens up the DirectX diagnostics panel. click on the display tab and look to the left panel. You should easily see what graphics card or chip you are using. (This is required information when selecting the correct download from the developers site).

If you are asked to turn off your Data Execution Prevention for this game to run. You can create an exception so that the game will run without having to turn DEP off. Please bear in mind it’s rare that anyone even mentioned getting a DEP warning. If you are not sure how to create an exception read THIS article, which tells you how to do it.

If you are having problems unzipping the game giveaways zip file, for example getting a message saying the file is invalid try using a different file archiver such as 7-Zip, J-Zip, CAM UnZip, Hamster Free Zip Archiver, GZip, B Zip2, peazip, ZipUnzip, FreeRAR Extract Frog, RAR File Open Knife, ALZip, The Extractor, RarZilla Free Unrar

Okay, that should be enough. there are actually many more free versions available. also there are other commercial titles such as the well-known WinRAR, Stuffit, WinAce, NXPowerlite and Corel Winzip Pro, but IMO 7-Zip is probably one of the better freebies. I did purchase a copy of Stuffit when it was on sale a few years ago and recently repurchased a more up to date version when it was o offer via BitsDuJour, but didn’t like the interface for some reason, so hardly ever use it.

If you are posting requests for help late in the day I would suggest posting in the main giveaway forums in the game Game Discussion . If you’ve installed the game but it won’t work for some reason, it should still be registered, so someone may be able to help at another time. Unfortunately if your problem is actually installing it then once the giveaway period is over there’s nothing that can be done until the game is given away again (though that isn’t guaranteed. It’s always worth checking out the free games sites as sometimes the games we get here are also available for free from them as well.

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Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with search engines like Google. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of potential cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away more decent games to draw more users to their site. There are a lot of game sites and they all want your business. I really do think if we can improve on the quality and numbers of users leaving suitable feedback more developers will join the project. It’s a great environment to recruit beta testers as well; giving the community the opportunity to try out games that aren’t on general release yet.

Again PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE leave some suitable feedback once you’ve played the game for an hour or so. It can be positive or negative, but please explain your reasons for the feedback you post. It doesn’t need to be a dissertation, just a paragraph or two explaining what you think could improve the game and maybe what you didn’t like about the game with suggestions to replace the negative area’s. Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment. It will be very much appreciated by the developer, the giveaway team and me. Thank you.

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Additional Game Information

I stopped Referencing to FreeGamePick some time ago, but it seems they have changed their policy of forcing you to install toolbars and change your home page as has MyPlayCity (so I was informed via the forums). Proceed with caution when downloading any game till you’ve made sure you can uncheck toolbar and home page changing check boxes. Someone has also said to me that Gametop has reversed itself and now forces you to install toolbars. I’e not checked this yet, so just be careful when visiting any of these sites. MyPlayCity is the best site for variety and sheer numbers of free games, but you will find the odd game available from the other free sites.

Kein Win 7?!?

……………………Moderator Comment…………………

Yes there is. It works fine on the two Win 7 computers I installed it to so far (Win 7 Pro 64 bit and win 7 Ultimate 64 bit).