History: I owned 3 different versions of Chessmaster over the years, and loved it. Lots of people loved the tutorials and being able to play against different personalitied opponants. But i really liked how CM could analyse your game and "talk" to you at the same time "Chessmaster recommends you do ABC instead of XYZ, and you win, a pawn". Thats what i enjoyed most about CM.
Future: I'm on a Mac now, so that limited my choices for chess programs. I was asking around on the chess.com forum about free programs but it got too hard for me. You have to find a free engine and a free GUI, know how to install them and both had to be Mac compatible. I gave up and downloaded Shredder trial for free and used that for a month. Later, i purchased the cheapest version of Shredder (US22.00).
What do i think? I miss Chessmaster. Playing a game against Shredder is good, not much different to CM. But the analysis is not the same, maybe not as useful for me. You can get your games analysed and Shredder gives you a +/- after each of your moves and the opponents, and in some places it will give you a string of alternate moves you could have made. But it doesnt say at the end "you win a pawn" or "you have more room and your opponant is cramped". So in Shredder I dont always know whats better about the 5 or so moves it might recommend, or theres work to determine "i gained a bishop for 2 pawns and ..... maybe i have a better position as well". Shredder just gives you an alternate view in brackets that you can chose to follow. I learnt the most from CM.
On the plus side, you can choose to have a graph on the side of your game that shows after each move if white or black is in front, and by how much. I've enjoyed that, but it can also be a distraction because your working out why your so far up or down instead of working on your next move. You can turn it off if you like.
If you want Scott, send me a game of yours and i'll run it through Shredder analysis and i can post its output, give you an idea of what it does. See if its for you.
I've got work now, and am away this weekend, but i'm happy to post some screen shots etc if that'll help.
Shoot me any questions if you like, I'll be back on line Sunday arvo.