Board Games aren’t very fun, you know it, I know it, and God knows it. There’s no way a simple game like chess could ever hold my interest, let alone the interest of me as an eight year old. Unless the game in question happened to be the classic Battle Chess from 1988.
This game is much like other chess games out there, nothing different about how it plays. There are no weird rule changes; you can’t build a town center to build additional pawns, and no racing your knights for fun and profit. Nope, Battle Chess is unique in presentation alone. Although the screens might not show it, there lurks something awesome underneath the dull façade.
Just your average everyday chess game, or is it?
Much like the holographic chess game in star wars the pieces come to life and move around the board. Just tell each piece where you want it to go and watch it slowly shuffle from square to square. While it is cool to watch a rook transform from a tower into a hulking golem, the real fun comes when one piece takes another.
Oh, it’s on now.
One piece stands aside allowing the other into the square, a small gesture of civility before the brutal carnage that is about to unfold. Then both pieces unsheathe their weapons and engage in deadly mortal combat. Blows are traded, spells are cast, blood is spilled, and in the end one life is lost. Two pieces enter, one piece leaves.
Witness the carnage:
This was one of those few games that I and my friends didn’t play for real, we didn’t want to have a good old fashioned chess match. What we were simply after was to every battle animation the game had. We wanted to see the king beat the hell out of a queen with his scepter, we had to watch a knight stab a bishop, and most importantly we needed the rook crush every single piece on the goddamned board. ROOK SMASH!!!
This game was great, I had the CD version with the enhanced SVGA graphics and whatnot. I've probably still got the CD laying around somewhere too. Interplay used to be such a great company.
This is where I learnt to play chess as a kid, it was the first time my Grandparents realised video games weren't necessarily pointless, mindless wastes of time and could prove educational. I just loved the death animations and beating my Grandad at it.
nade: i remember getting this CD of 'classic' pc games. Almost all of them based game speed off of cpu clock speed. It's awesome to play them like that. Alley Cats FTW!!!!!!!
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Man.. I used to play this as a kid ALL THE TIME, 24/7.
E-mail me your clog, would you kindly?
myname at gmail
Shipero, good stuff yet again.
This is where I learnt to play chess as a kid, it was the first time my Grandparents realised video games weren't necessarily pointless, mindless wastes of time and could prove educational. I just loved the death animations and beating my Grandad at it.
But yeah, Battle Chess rocked my world when I was a kid, like so many other PC games. Ah, good times.
Yeah, some older Mac titles are like that too. I remember playing MoonPatrol on an early Mac and it was so effing fast I couldn't keep up.