Amazon.com: Chessmaster 9000: PC: Video Games

93 Reviews

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
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3.6 out of 5 stars (93 customer reviews)

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235 of 240 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent tutorial--with a side order of a chess program, November 22, 2002

By A Customer

First thing first: Chessmaster 9000 runs smoothly on my three-year-old laptop; the inteface, windows, and menus are intuitive and easy to customize; the boards, pieces, side windows (those showing moves made, pieces taken, etc.) and graphics in general are crips and clear. Two minor problems: a). if you run the game on a low resolution (800X600 or less), the various windows tend to "clutter" quickly and hide each other, making the larger 2D boards and the 3D ones useless. b). Unless you have a 3D accelerator, the "true 3D" chess boards don't work. These problems sound much worse than they actually are, since in practice you don't need to use most of the side windows, and the 3D boards tend to be more for "show" than for practical play; the medium-sized 2D boards are just fine.

Now for the chess program. Unless you are in the top 0.01% or so of players, the Chessmaster 9000's program can beat you. More important, for the vast majority of playes, are the numerous options. There are dozens of computer opoonents to choose from, on every level from complete novice to strong master, and each with their own "personality". No matter what your strength is, you will an oppoent that is on your level of play, and for a challange some that are anywhere from slightly stronger to a LOT stronger.

When it comes to the game itself, the program comes with all the expected frills: you can choose from dozens of different time controls, or set your own time controls; you can make them different for black and white, and force the computer to move anytime. You can start from any position, play black or white, give yourself (or the computer) odds in time or material, and so on. The "side" windows show anyhting from pieces taken and moves made to time remaining and name of opening. The computer can even annotate the game after it's finished.

In other words, in a few mouse clicks you can move from playing a friendly speed chess game against someone on your level, to a tournament game with a strong master (complete with the master's annotations, after the game), to polishing your Sicilian Dragon opening or rook-and-pawns endings (set up the position, give yourself infinite time and the computer 5 seconds a move when it's playing at its stongest level), to solving chess problems (set up the position, give the computer infinite time, come back after dinner and force it to move) and so on and so forth.

But the really nice thing about Chessmaster 9000 is that the chess program is almost incidental to the "classroom", "database room", and "kid's room". In these rooms, you can get an entire chess course, starting with "how does the pawn move?" and ending with "what is the strategic plan of the Grandmaster who played white in this position?". This tutorial alone is the equivalent of buying a few (good) instructional chess books, and topping it off with a couple of "my best games" volumes, opening encyclopedias, and endgame books. It is worth the price of the software all on its own.

You start with the kids' tutorials and the "Beginner's" stage in the classroom, which start with how pieces move, what checkmate is, and so on and show you some basic strenghts and weaknesses of the various pieces. You move from there to the "intermediate" level, where you learn and practive basic chess concepts--especially concepts like "initiative", "space", "pawn formation", "planning", and so on that most mediocre players know SOMETHING about but not nearly enough to get better. Then you move on to advanced concepts in strategic chess thinking, ending with looking deeply at grandmasters' games and trying to think like them. You also get to practice endings, openings, and middle-game combinations as seperate subjects. Each level comes not only with a tutorial, but with numerous drills, tests, and so on. When this is done, you are ready to move to the huge database of endings, openings, and masters' games in the "Database" room. There you can practice what you learned, and try to "think like a grandmaster".

If you do not have a chess program on your computer, or are looking for a present for a kid that doesn't (perhaps trying to interest them in chess) then this is unquestionably the best PC chess program on the market. It is particualrly suitable as a gift for children since it contains no sex, violence, or profanity, and does not require dad's newest computer to run--the old one would do fine. Finally, unlike most video games, it is a program you or your child will still be using two years from now; chess is chess, and it doesn't need the newest 3D accelerator, graphic card, or CPU to be good and have what is now called "replay value". If you become good enough to beat it at the hardest level--a feat that, in most action games, takes the average 13-year-old about two weeks--then call the local papers, since you are probably the next Bobby Fischer.

It is precisely this long life that is the one reason NOT to buy this program--if you have the Chessmaster 8000 or 7000. They, too, have all of the tutorials, options, and so on that this program has; the one difference is the slightly slicker graphics and the "true 3D" boards--both almost useless, for practical purposes, and not worth buying a new program to have.

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180 of 183 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good program that could be better, December 11, 2002

By	Ironblayde (Omaha, Nebraska, USA) - See all my 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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132 of 141 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Chessmaster still missing the boat, December 5, 2002

By	Troyce Wilson (Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Chessmaster series of programs have been fine tutorials with some nice showy features for the casual chess enthusiast. However, the publishers of this program are continuing to show their laziness in upgrading the product. Most "upgrades" just tweak a few aspects, so that they are really not needed if you're running an older version.
They are two very serious problems with this program that they seem intent on never fixing. One is their continued insistance on forcing the player to have the original CD in the drive when starting the program. No one likes having to do this, and as a result, there's a flourishing blackmarket on the net of cracks to remove this feature.
The second, and most serious problem, is their continued neglect of the Windows 2000 operating system. This program will only work correctly if you're running Windows 98, or one of the poor saps who was suckered into Windows ME. Even though it touts itself as running on XP, there are severe problems with it in that environment. If the Chessmaster folks want to continue selling their product, they must make it Windows 2000 and XP compliable, in every way. Until then, we'll turn to other products.