I forgot to mention major BUG #6:
The "hints" are sometimes the WORST POSSIBLE MOVES. Why give a "hint" that ends in disaster? Fortunately, "hints" can be turned off and that's what I did for my chess student ... and my student has a mentor to tell him that you don't move your queen into a triple-fork position for any reason whatsoever. YES, this is true!!!

I want to add that other than this application, everything else I've downloaded from game.giveawayoftheday.com has been in the very good to GREAT range! THANKS!!

PLEASE... DON'T COMMENT UNLESS YOU'VE ACTUALLY USED THE PROGRAM FOR A WHILE.

Have any of the people making positive comments actually used this program??? This is one of the buggiest and user UNfriendly programs I've ever seen, and I've been writing and using software since the 1970s!!!

Many of the comments read like "a good indicator is to look at the size of the program, and as you can see this bad boy comes in at a 178MB just for the installation!" NOPE - SIZE IS NOT AN INDICATION OF ANYTHING! I've rewritten applications that were more than 1MB, and ended up providing a BETTER application with more features and with a size of 400K. SIZE can be BAD.

Other comments say something like "looks good;" "It is only 177mb retard lol…. IT’S FREE wow…. it looks awesome;" "looks nice;" "it's free;" etc., etc. WHY NOT TRY IT FIRST, THEN MAKE A COMMENT?

The major problems are:
1) Unbelievably cumbersome user interface. Did they actually try it I wonder???
2) "Levels" do not correspond to anything (other than the "monkey" level were the moves are pseudorandom. Perhaps it's a database problem.
3) Freezes up on certain moves. Serious debugging REQUIRED!
4) ACTUALLY A NICE display in 2-D display showing the possible moves of each piece for a beginner ... BUT ... program ALWAYS resigns much sooner than a human would. IN FACT, it resigned early in a game with a "chess beginner" although the computer could have easily won the game in three or four moves (I've been playing 40 years and I know what I saw). Besides, you NEVER "resign" when teaching chess to a beginner. So although this is set up as a GREAT learning tool, it doesn't follow through and FAILS.
5) The 3-D view is next to worthless.

My chess student ended up playing Mr. Smoozles and VEGA ... Vega is a GREAT game that requires a lot of skill - maybe too much - and that's probably why it has a low rating.

I just wanted to thank you for the Chess Game of last week. Downloaded and worked real well in five of my computers in the house. I have to tell you I,m really enjoying them... John R. using XP and Vista

@GrayKnight:

"Too long a splash-screen" - You can turn it off in the Preferences.

"Takes over the entire screen" - You can run the game in windowed mode (Visual FX).

:)

#51 I remember such a game for the Amiga (How many? I'm dating myself...) years ago. I seem to recall "BattleChess" as the name, too...


#63 Oh, yes! That annoying voice. I forgot to list that as my dis-satisfaction (4) because, fortunately, I found the option (open "Sound Effects" in the lower set of menu items) that will turn the stooopid thing off.

#50 says > the game cheats, by making illegal moves to capture pieces, and will not allow you to use your king to kill pieces, but will use it’s king to kill.

#66 says they forgot to include the en passant rule


Those last two, if true (I haven't confirmed), would constitute *SERIOUS* deficiencies in the main purpose of the game, in my opinion. All in all, seems to be showing some of the earmarks of a Beta-test-stage program.

Well, maybe in the next rev...

I managed to get the huge file downloaded but the key checking component would not connect to the GiveAwayoftheday server. I even took the huge risk of disabling everything and it still would not connect.
I probably could say the Chess software was fine (accept I couldn't get it opened) but the GOTD key thing blows.

I only tested it so far in single-player mode. Gives me a good, tough game (your mileage may vary...) Pretty "skins", though leaves me hankering for more (sculpted pieces, for instance).

A few dis-satisfactions: (1) Too long a splash-screen (though, in all fairness, it lets you skip it by hitting "Escape"). I don't like programs that get too self-important, as though they're the only thing I'd ever want to use my computer for.

(2) Takes over the entire screen. Does not have -- or at least, I have not found -- a way to Minimize (to do, say, some real work in between moves) or resize. Falls in the "self-important" category.

(3) SIGNIFICANT PROGRAM BUG: When you try to "UNDO" a move. Sometimes it works okay, but if you looked cross-eyed at it when hitting UNDO, or you double-clicked it, or your timing was off or the phase of the moon was out of sync, the program completely hangs and the only way out of it is to end it w/ Task Mangler.

Existence of (3) suggests there might be other programming holes I haven't found simply because I haven't played it very much, but that's just conjecture on my part, not an observation.

78# yes, effectively these games that just unpack as a sub folder of C:\games are in essence portable programs. If you have enough space on your USB thumb drive and it is fast enough to read the large files some of the games have without introducing an unplesant delay it isolates the giveaway from system crashes and upgrades.

Oh my... You can't uninstall this game because (like many others) it hasn't been installed in the first place.
A game that is only unpacked into a folder just doesn't have to be uninstalled. Simply delete the folder it's been unpacked into, and voila - it's gone.

(Remember this for future Merscom games - and others...)

has a level around 1900-2000 fide i would say. Not much for a chess program today.
Takes also too much place.
But still great for beginners.

Excellent game. The moves are suggested by the program. GRRRRReat

I so wanted to download this program... I just love chess. Not sure what happened tonight though. I tried four times to download it starting around 10 PM my time. The download times were very slow - I know it is a large file but I have cable - and each of the downloads were "corrupt" and could not be unzipped.

I tried a 5th time, but couldn't finish the download before 2:10 my time and the download time expired.

Very disappointing. Well, maybe I'll buy it.

Did anyone else have a problem with the download or is the problem with my provider?

BTW, two of the attempts were with the mirror site, the other three the normal download link.

One of the best I have tried. No dragons or other bullcrap. Great game for people to learn the basics and a little bit further. For more advanced moves, have to buy another chess game, but you pay for what you get. Thumbs up for med players.

Hey G, #22, I downloaded the zip acornsoft chess game and unzipped it. What do I open it with?

Google for: BBC Micro emulator

It was an 8 bit micro from the UK in the 80's. Had some pretty good games - including a few near perfect arcade lookalikes (defender, pacman etc). It'll take a little bit of work to set up but if you enjoy games it'll open up a whole new (old) world for you :-) In the days of small micros, they had to concentrate on making games addictive rather than pretty! (there was of course also a lot of trash for the BBC micro too, but read the reviews to find the timeless classics. Some of the text adventures were ... quite original...)

I'm going to give it a chance since the one detractor who posted an link to an 'alternate' game posted something to what I call a junk search engine, and not a game at all. I did have difficulty the first time I tried to use 'setup', getting a message that the destination file couldn't be created. I just tried again - it says the extraction can't be completed, so I can't try it. Maybe it is junk. I think I had this problem with another Merscom that was offered here. I can't be sure, though.

nearly 38 mins to download - and I'm on Broadband not even on dialup.... loads of diskspace too, so that's not the hold up; it had better be worth it! No time to check it out after waiting so long, so no further comment - just "dialup folks, be warned!"

You think you found problems? I can't get mine to close... before the first gambit, the pawns formed a union and went on strike, the Queens ran off to San Francisco to get married, the king's are arguing over who quit before firing a shot, the rooks are demanding a do over and the bishops won't stop crying, "Mea Culpa."
Seriously, my Chessmaster3000 (circa 1991) came on two little floppy disks, and never had a glitch. For 127MB of code, I was really hoping for something on par with "Love Chess - Age of Egypt"... now THAT is a computer chess game! (link not provided cause it's got nawty pictures)

I have been trying to download the chess game all afternoon and I get nothing. My IE says "connecting" but it never does. I thought that perhaps because the file is so big the download site was to busy to accomodate my dl, but considering no one else seems to be having the problem, must be just me. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Bill

If you are really interested in chess, there are many free alternatives which are far superior to this. For starters, you might want to try Winboard and Arena. And for playing on the Internet, there is the Free Internet Chess Club.
These three options, by the way, are top-notch --both for beginners and very experienced players.

I downloaded this game to try out since I loved playing chess with my mom. I played a couple of test games on Monkey Mode and was a bit surprised when the computer gave up as soon as I captured the queen.

I thought it had to be an error of some kind and I had somehow directly captured the king without a check or checkmate, so I checked that it was indeed the queen and played again, and again... if you catch the queen on Monkey Mode the computer forfeits. That was disappointing, but before I could figure out how to test on other levels of play the game froze and I had to close it. No time right now to reopen and test other levels.

I had a hard time figuring out how to start a new game after the computer forfeited, finally I had to just reset moves to the first move in the current game and play a new game from there.

I do like the variety of boards and pieces that can be used, however, I think those are also a lot of what makes it so large of a download, so I think it would be wise for the game designer to figure out some way to make these optional downloads from their site. Package the game with say 3 versions and then make the rest ones that players can download if they want to. I would also like to be able to freely rotate the board in 3D view, since I like to play chess with the board at a subtle angle to the side. (personal quirk)

My 2 complaints about this game are

1. you have to click on the text inside the buttons not the buttons themselves

2. (as with a lot of chess games) they forgot to include a rule called en passant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant.

other then those 2 issues the game is good.

FYI the reason for this games massive size is NOT the graphics, or sound! It is a 372Mbyte chess.mdb MS Access compatible database file in the archive folder. You can reduce it to 196Mbytes by instructing windows to compress it to save disk space... Seems to work with the chess.mdb renamed too.
Database contains 3 tables:
Party which contains 443,219 records including each games moves
Player which contains 18,896 records
Problem which contains 60 records
Unsure if it is ever used to play a game of chess.

The chess pieces are not 3D models but simple 2D sprites which is probably why there is no option to spin the 3D board around in as it would become obvious it was only pseudo 3D rendering instead it just flips the board which maintains the illusion.

*CHEERS PHIL* (#24)

@ #10 djclay: You are the type of person that has made me quit even reading all the comments and just scan for certain ones.

Anywho, game installed well on Vista Home Premium and ran without problem. Great graphics and VERY blood thirsty AI unless turned way down. I love chess and never anyone to play against (except my 13 year old daughter) and love the chance to try this out. Only played two games so far, but looking forward to more.

Two thumbs up and higly recommend this for download even if you are just wanting to learn.

ibwebb

Had to uninstall because the voice is too Annoying for me. If they improve the voice I would keep it, but I think I will stick with my Chessmaster Grandmaster edition.

I have decided that I do not want to keep this download. I'm having a difficult time trying to find how to un-install it. Any suggestions please?

Comment by thomkat #50
Also I tried to uninstall the game. Couldn’t uninstall, even tried to use system restore, with no success. Ended up just removing the file on operating system drive. I hope that it will not harm the operating system.
No it won't harm your operating system.
The following behavior seems strange.
No start menu entry.
No desktop icon link.
No uninstaller.
Did not register as an installed program in standard windows add-remove program list.
Did not register as an installed program in Win Utilities uninstaller.
Did not register as an installed program in Revo Uninstaller.

Until you realize this is a portable app. You can run the game from a USB memory stick on any computer you have without installing anything on any of them. For people worried about disc space this may be the answer. Just plug it in when you want to play.

Not good for dial up.
Started at 7:00 AM (EST) and only have 49.5 meg downloaded and 13 hrs to go with only 11 hrs & 25 minutes left for downloading and installing -= looks like I will not make it.
Large games may require more hours to do this with.
I would have liked to get this one, (and could have if it was a week day when I have access to a high speed computer)
and will continue to download until the end, and hope that things speed up.

I used to like chess, but I never was an advanced player.
Now I sometimes match two different chess AIs from various authors to see which one does better.
If you just want to play chess and you don't need things like 3D graphics and such, get WinBoard (http://tim-mann.org/xboard.html). It's free and has GNU Chess engine included and there are many other AIs (chess engines) for it, most of which are free.
#51: There is a such game. I've played it myself, too bad I can't remember the title.

@ 15, The game is over as the computer resigned.

Follow up post from Blaze # 53 this is very strange, my computer doesn't even list GrandMaster Chess as being ever installed. My PC can't even find files on it when I do a search. I'm not wanting to just delete the folder incase the parasite found it's way into my registry, what do I do???!!!

At last a chess game!!
Thanks a lot :-)

To all who are confused by the Game-Over window. Press OK and look for something like this carefully: White resigned / Black resigned

WARNING - THIS GAME INSTALLS A TOP LEVEL SERVER

WARNING - I could not immediately access the Web after installing this game. It was talking to who knows who.

WARNING - Anyone smart enough to put together a game like this could be playing Chess with your personal files too.

WARNING - This game installs a SERVER that requires top level access during install and it bypasses your firewall.

WARNING - YOU ARE TAKING YOUR OWN PRIVACY RISK WITH THIS INSTALL - in my opinion.

Horribly written code. Installed fine XP SP3, except it did not make a folder or icon in the start menu. Had to find folder thru explorer to run game. After 5 moves in Monkey mode, I captured the queen with a pawn, and the game was over pre-maturely! No where near checkmate!! So I went to uninstall, and of course, no uninstall feature anywhere. Very poor code - poor install - and poor uninstall. Not a good download.

I have the same problem as # 15 & 29. After a total of only 14 moves!!

[IMG]http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g197/apO_1957/tijdelijk/chess.jpg[/IMG]

Sooo close! I really want a visually stunning battlechess game one day.
You know, the type where after you make a move it actually looks like the pieces come to life just to duke it out.

This game is not worth the time or HD space. I installed and played, and found that the game cheats, by making illegal moves to capture pieces, and will not allow you to use your king to kill pieces, but will use it's king to kill.

Also I tried to uninstall the game. Couldn't uninstall, even tried to use system restore, with no success. Ended up just removing the file on operating system drive. I hope that it will not harm the operating system.

This game is trash!!!

I've had more fun with other chess games, that won't cheat!

HUGE TWO THUMBS DOWN!!!

@Roost: The screenshots are not from the version of the game that's given away here. And the colors of the board can be changed anyway. There are many different "skins" for that. And yes - one of them is red & blue, too.

I don't get how to change the skins?

Also, same as #16, I've had to close with Task Manager twice....so maybe it has to be the only thing running on your computer at the time?

I still love it, though! Just have to iron out the kinks.

A pity that one cannot offer a draw or is that option hidden somewhere?
Shortcoming is that you cannot see quickly what the score is from captured peaces.There is a tab with ´figures´ that I dont understand....
Design of the chesspeaces is nice,the voice is a joke.The man is nuts.

Paul

I’m a sucker for chess software so I’m always on the lookout for good ones. Grand Master Chess 3 installed with no problems on my VHPx64 machine but the program is disappointing.

The lower levels are bizarre - what does “game over” mean? It kept saying that even though it could have progressed. It did play more sensibly - and quite strongly - from medium level upwards but I prefer programs where I can fine-tune the levels, e.g. with half moves or seconds. And I like programs which keep score.

CMC3 has a wide variety of skins for the board and pieces but in general it doesn't feel as if has the serious player in mind.

I’ve seen GNU chess recommended here but if you can do without gimmicky 3D (most serious players prefer 2D for clarity’s sake) then check out another freeware offering, Arena. The degree to which it can be customised is amazing. It can keep score with a bar graph and can act as a graphical interface for any number of free chess engines. A word of warning - it plays strongly on even the lowest levels as I know only too well.

#35, with a BBC Micro, as #22 said.

I am going top have to say this game is one to pass over today.

The graphics are really nice, the interface is a bit clunky but useable, however this is 2009 and this game just doesn't cut it. The fact that you can play friends over the internet is nice but there are tons of ways to do this already online through a variety of web 2.0 sites that offer much more functionality.

When I looked at it it reminded me of a chess game I had way back in the late 90's that I think was also named Chessmaster, but it besides being a game that you played chess on also taught you chess and way back then it actually came in under the 400 mb that this game reqiures once installed and it had all of the other features that this one has (except the mp3 option, but honestly is that a killer feature?)

So folks save yourself the disappointment that this game provides. If you really want to play chess on the computer look for a free alternative or go top chess.com and play persons from around the world or even the computer.

Seems to install and play just fine on both Windows XPSP3 and Windows 7. I love chess, so will try it out more later, but at least this game seems to work "right out of the box". :)

That's nice will not authenticate....Can't connect.... NO it isn't me...

A chess game ohh boy. Hey where are you whiterabbit, we miss your reviews this weekend. Hope you are ok.

awesome, this is great thanks

#22 G, Iam wondering the same thing as #35 magiccrpet. The file
you linked to looks more like a WindowBlinds Skin File. I don't have WindowBlinds installed so I can't be sure... If you fine the correct link please post it for us. Thanks.

Works great on vista 64 bit. Cool game. Thanks for all the great freebies.

Game looks great.....Thanks Merscom and GOTD ;-)