bdugan@teri.bio.uci.edu (Bill Dugan) (04/26/91)
Interplay Productions presents: Battle Chess for the Macintosh Checkmate for the Macintosh ------------------------------- Battle Chess for the Macintosh is an animated, black & white chess game in which the pieces walk around and beat up on each other as you play chess. For instance, if you make a pawn capture another pawn, your pawn will walk to the other one, the two will square off, and fight with their spears until the victorious pawn wins the battle. Fun for the whole family. Battle Chess is real chess, too, and lets you play against the computer at 10 skill levels as well as the ability to let the Mac think for 1 to 10,000 minutes before making its move. You can also play against another human or against a distant opponent via modem play. Battle Chess has an opening library of 30,000 moves. You need a Mac Plus or later to play, with at least 1 meg of memory. (2 megs would be nice.) You don't need a hard disk but again, one is recommended. Battle Chess retails for $49.95 and can be bought direct from Interplay Productions by calling 1-800-969-GAME, or contact your favorite computer store or mail order outlet. (The latter two will probably start getting boxes in next week.) Checkmate for the Macintosh is The Best personal computer chess game commercially available. In our tests, Checkmate beat Chessmaster 2100, Sargon IV, and AI Chess. It has an opening library of over 300,000 moves and features the most sophisticated algorithm commercially available. Further, the more memory you allocate Checkmate, the better game it will play by virtue of the bigger transposition table it can build. Checkmate features color and black & white 3D and 2D boards, as well as a Situation Room that shows Checkmate's current line of thinking. You can also play on an adjustable board that you can tilt or skew to many viewing angles. If Checkmate sees a particularly strong move, it can add it to its opening library so as to learn as it plays. Its level of play is adjustable with minutes & seconds allowed to think, as well as matching play and a more basic mode of play that does not fully exploit Checkmate's playing ability. A "What If?" feature allows you to explore lines of play with Checkmate suggesting preferred moves, and during games Checkmate can always suggest a move. And yes, it's 32-bit clean! Checkmate runs on a Mac Plus or later with 1 meg of ram. (2 megs would be nice for color play, and the more memory you give it, the better it plays.) Checkmate retails at $54.95 and can be bought direct from Interplay Productions by calling 1-800-969-GAME, or contact your favorite computer store or mail-order outlet. (The latter two will probably start getting boxes in next week.)