eabu111@orion.oac.uci.edu (Steven Luh) (05/07/91)
I just played my friend's Battle Chess v.1.0. It is quite good. I was expecting another bad port (generally, games ported to the Mac are very poor) but was pleasantly suprised at the graphics. I have seen the Amiga version of Battle Chess and the graphics is kind of choopy. The Mac version seems to be redone or touched up to fit the Mac graphics. At my first few plays, I encountered bugs already. For example, sometimes when you select a piece to move, you can not deselect it (there is no option for touch move or not) and if you try to deliberately move into another one of your pieces, there is no "illegal move" check before the piece is moved and the piece will move into the selected position. That also gives rise to problems because the program seems to check for the move AFTER you have moved your piece and the piece moved will just "spin" without stop, the only way is to reset the computer. There is copy protection in the form of entering a code. The game is in black and white. There is an option to play against another player throught a modem. The animation is very entertaining and very amusing. I believe that the animation is different than the Amiga version (unsure). As for the level of play, I am not a good chess player so someone will have to rate the program. Oh, there are different levels (10?) of play to choose from. FYI, I was running this game on a Mac IIci under System 7GM with several inits running. Hopefully the "bug" was not caused by th inits (oops). Steven (No Fancy Attachments Here)