peterk1
Member
I was a bit bored this weekend with tons of time on my hands and thought I'd get back into chess...which is an absolute time-vacuum cleaner and hence the perfect solution to my boredom.
(Before settling on chess I though D&D might also fit the bill so I ended up installing Neverwinter Nights and ended up on some serious role-playing server and the first person I run into goes into incredibly long winded descriptions of some smelly festering wound on her leg that I absolutely did not care about....might have been a DM setting up some kind of quest for me, but I ended up realizing I REALLY, REALLY hate role-playing in a chat window, and maybe even serious role-playing with strangers in general...so on-line D&D was unfortunately out although I still now kind of have the urge to kill monsters, explore and find treasure)
I was very disappointed to find that the vast majority of my chess programs that I used to run on Win 95 (haven't played seriously for about 10 years), don't run anymore. Most of them played but access a menu to do something and poof...crash.
So I'm just wondering if anything really cool has come out in the past 10 years or so in the world of chess software.
...and just for fun....a small list of the games I liked and why.
Power Chess from Sierra. This was a really fun game when it came out. The "Queen" would pop up every now and then during the game to give you a tip or tell you to be careful or to give you a little lesson in the middle of the game. It was a little too focused on teaching you only one specific opening (Kings gambit I think) though.
Chessmaster 6000/8000. I used to take advantage of the personalities in the game to set up little tournaments with myself and 5 computer opponents (2 weaker and 3 stronger). I'd play one game a day for a week and keep track of the standings. This was tons of fun and felt really serious. I think I upped my game tons in a really short period of time by doing this. The final games on Friday or Saturday were always stress filled affairs if I was at or near the top of the standings.
Haven't checked to see if my old Fritz runs OK yet, but to be honest I never had much fun playing against Fritz. It was awesome for analysis though.
(Before settling on chess I though D&D might also fit the bill so I ended up installing Neverwinter Nights and ended up on some serious role-playing server and the first person I run into goes into incredibly long winded descriptions of some smelly festering wound on her leg that I absolutely did not care about....might have been a DM setting up some kind of quest for me, but I ended up realizing I REALLY, REALLY hate role-playing in a chat window, and maybe even serious role-playing with strangers in general...so on-line D&D was unfortunately out although I still now kind of have the urge to kill monsters, explore and find treasure)
I was very disappointed to find that the vast majority of my chess programs that I used to run on Win 95 (haven't played seriously for about 10 years), don't run anymore. Most of them played but access a menu to do something and poof...crash.
So I'm just wondering if anything really cool has come out in the past 10 years or so in the world of chess software.
...and just for fun....a small list of the games I liked and why.
Power Chess from Sierra. This was a really fun game when it came out. The "Queen" would pop up every now and then during the game to give you a tip or tell you to be careful or to give you a little lesson in the middle of the game. It was a little too focused on teaching you only one specific opening (Kings gambit I think) though.
Chessmaster 6000/8000. I used to take advantage of the personalities in the game to set up little tournaments with myself and 5 computer opponents (2 weaker and 3 stronger). I'd play one game a day for a week and keep track of the standings. This was tons of fun and felt really serious. I think I upped my game tons in a really short period of time by doing this. The final games on Friday or Saturday were always stress filled affairs if I was at or near the top of the standings.
Haven't checked to see if my old Fritz runs OK yet, but to be honest I never had much fun playing against Fritz. It was awesome for analysis though.