Rating: 
Summary: Excellent game - plus an important correction
Review: First I want to make a correction to a review I read on here that is WRONG. In fact, I almost didnt purchase Chessmaster 8000 on the basis of this review stating that the program didn't run on Windows XP. It DOES run on XP. I have had no problem whatsoever installing or running this great game. I also installed the patch, available off of Chessmaster.com. Maybe there are problems with Win 2000, but none that I can tell with XP. As far as the game...I am blown away. It's simply fantastic - with a wealth of opponents to play, detailed learning materials to access, and a variety of cool sets to play on. I was introduced to chess over 20 years ago when my parents brought me back a wooden hand-carved set from Germany (I still have it), and although I havent played consistently over the years, I have always enjoyed the game. Certainly this is no substitute for sitting down across from another person, but CM 8000 will definitely improve your game, no matter your level.
Rating: 
Summary: ChessMaster Review
Review: I am a gifted chess player and do not remember a time in my life when I did not play chess. Imagine my disappointment when I first went to kindergarten and discovered that I was the only one who played chess much less even knew the game. ChessMaster, with its tutoring capabilities, is the program for the beginning player and, with its library of games, a must for the chess affecianando. With a variety of levels of play to select, as well as playing types, only the very, very best chess player will be unable to find a competitive, but not dominate, opponent. While the graphics might appeal to others, I am a dinosaur and the standard board is fine. However, those options are available and are quite good. In general, the program has everything most people would want and is an important program to have in one's library. The only drawback to the program is the one common to all chess programs. Chess by machine lacks the spark of human intuition and reflects the brute force approach to the game which obtains from mathematical equations. For the male mind in particular, chess is a 'must learn' game. It uses all areas of reasoning and teaches reading and language skills (surprise!) as well as the more commonly recognized spacial logic. Chess players at very high levels are also accomplished artists. They write, play music, paint, speak multiple languages, and, in the last century, one strong but unsuccessful candidate for the world title was a professional ballet dancer. Personally, I have worked in highly technical fields in aerospace, exactly where the common perception puts chess players, but I have also been an interpretor and am now writing books for a living. ChessMaster teaches chess and chess teaches much more. As the best general chess program available, consider ChessMaster.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent chess program. Works fine on Windows 98
Review: I am somewhat of a chess nut and I have owned the most recent version of Chessmaster since its inception. Chessmaster 8000 is an excellent chess partner/teacher for players at almost any level. It is versatile and can provide opponents that will challenge but not overwhelm players at skill levels from beginner to master. However, if you really want to test yourself, you can crank it up to its highest level and give it a go. Unless you are an international grand master, chances are that it will be a lesson in humility. The tutorials for beginners and children are particularly good. There are a number of exercises for intermediate players, but the real value is Chessmaster's ability to analyze games and recommend moves. The opening book database is vast and the database of games of Grand Masters is very useful, especially for intermediate and advanced players who want to improve their games. Chessmaster 8000 has several desirable improvements over 7000. This is the second release using the new interface and the initial bugs have been worked out. I have had no problems with it on Windows 98. The 3D perspective has been improved and a number of new chess sets and boards have been added. The children's area has also been improved. There is a very valuable tutorial on endgames by Josh Waitzkin for intermediate player and above. There are also far more computer opponents to play against. The best improvement is an enhancement of the chess engine that makes it even stronger. This is a difference that less than 1% of tournament players will discern, but it furter legitimizes Chessmaster in minds of serious chess players. Even with the stronger engine, Chessmaster 8000 is not the strongest chess program available, but on the highest level it will beat 99.9% of players and it cannot be matched for versatility and teaching. If you are you are looking for a good chess partner or teacher, you can't go wrong with Chessmaster.
Rating:
Summary: Bought it for my kids; I play when they're in school!
Review: I bought the Chessmaster 8000 program when my seven year old son began beating his father after a few months of addictive play on the Lego Chess program. He took to this new program like a fish to water. All I did was install it, show him the Kid's Room Icon, and he was off, playing a range of kid opponents (names, photos, and playing style of each provided) with skills from Chimpanzee to future International Master. He has his choice of playing a rated or unrated game, so he can still practice playing strong opponents without compromising his rating and bruising his ego. There's a large number of chess sets and boards to choose from, although the most whimsical (gnomes, dogs, etc.) are a little hard for him to distinguish during play.The tutorials in the grownup part, plus the drills that follow, have also been great fun for him. We have not put this program to the full test, since no one in our family is an expert player (yet), but give us a year or two to work with this program, and who knows? In the meantime, I have to wait for the kids to go to school to get my turn with Chessmater 8000, and it has proved an excellent teacher and opponent for me as well.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing! but has flaws
Review: I bought this game shortly after the christmas holidays, as, although I can't say why, I was consumed in a storm of chess obsession, and was buying chess paraphernalia left and right. Over the holidays, while in Montana, my younger brother and I played several games a day on a set we had brought, and had a great deal of fun, but we both had absolutely no idea of how to play the game beyond simply moving the pieces. Becuase of this, I decided to, once we got back home in Virginia, buy several books and a computer program to work on my skills. Let me tell you, I'm sooo glad that I bought this game. In short, this game is outstanding. The size of the game is enourmous, packing two CD's full of constant learning and fun. The game is organized into six rooms, namely the Game Room, Tounament Room, Classroom, Kids' Room, Database, and Library. The Game Room, obviously, is where you can play unrated games agaist a whole host of personalities, ranging from simulations of such GM's as Tal, Kasparov, Anand, and Fischer, to three year olds. In other words, you're sure to find a suitable oponent, and, for 99% of the players out there, an oponent who can dispatch you with ease. In addition to a wide selection of possible oponents, the Game Room has a great deal of other attractive features, such as a Quick Hint option for your next move, and, my personal favorite, the option to have the game analyze all of your and your opponent's moves, offering suggestions and highlighting mistakes(after you've finished the match, of course). This feature can have a decidedly sobering effect, of course. For example, shortly after discovering the feature, I had one of my games analyzed for me, smugly thinking I had soundly beaten my opponent, only to be informed that I had missed 16 mating oportunities! Another area of the game that I frequent is the Classroom, where a whole range of interesting and informative tutorials can be accessed, starting with basic stuff, such as how to move the pieces, to advanced end game courses by Josh Waitzkin, the protagonist of the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer. Josh's courses are absolutely great, as you can actually hear him speak his lessons. The only downside, I suppose, to his courses is that he goes very rapidly, and you need more chess ability than I currently possess to really get the most out of them. Unfortunately, the other courses are spoken by someone with an incredibly irritating voice, so I normally just turn off the sound when he's talking. In fact, its almost painful to listen to him at times, when he says stuff like: "If you got that one right, give yourself a cookie. Oh, and, give me one to." Yes, its really that bad. The Library, like all of the areas of the game, continues the trend and has a ton of great stuff. For example, there is a section containing illustrative games dating back to the late 1700's, of such players as Morphy, Kasparov (including his Deep Blue matches) and many others, all with commentary and annotation. In addition to to classic game section, you can look at Chessmaster's opening book references, or make your own opening book, which, needless to say, is an invaluable tool. The Tournament Room is where you can play in tournaments with other personalites, or even create a tournament with only the best of the GM's and watch how they play each other. Actually, I got some interesting opening ideas from watching a Kasparov-Karpov simulation match, so making tournaments like the above can actually be quite helpful. Also, the tournament room is where you can play rated games, to get a feel for what your actual chess rating is. The Kid's Room is basically a mini game within the game, and provides kids with a condensed version of bits of all of Chessmaster's other rooms. For example, you can play kid specific opponents, ranging from very bad to a young Josh Waitzkin, rated at 2100. My little sisters, 6 and 9, both enjoy this part of the game a lot, and the 6 year old was overjoyed when she crushed Stanly the Chimpanzee, rated at 1, who makes completely random moves. Also, the kid's room has a great deal of chess sets designed for kids, like a set where the men are all little gnomes. The next room, the Database, contains a collection of some 500,000 games played throughout history. Unfortunatly, I don't have much to say about this area of the game, as I haven't used it very much, but its basically what you would think it would be. You can search for specific games, specific opening lines, etc. After such a glowing review, you may be wondering why I bothered to say that the game has some flaws in the title of my review. Well, it certainly has its fair share. As nearly every other reviewer has written, the game, for some idiotic reason, doesn't seem to work very well with Windows 2000. Most of the problems seem to arise in the classroom sections of the game, especially when audio is involved. Its become a painfully common occurence for a little error window to pop up, saying that something or other's size is too small, whatever that means. Regardless, the sound gets cut off, and every once in a while, the whole game crashes. Also, as others have said, the game takes up all of your computer's available resources while running. For example, while writing this review I had the game on, minimized obviously. The game's seemingly unquenchable thirst for memory caused the appearance of my typing on the screen to be delayed, so that what my fingers were doing didn't show up on the screen until after I had finished typing. Although not that bad, it is somewhat annoying. Also, as at least one other reviewer stated, the game lacks polish. For instance, the classroom tutorials a chock full of minor errors, such question numbers that don't match the page number of the tutorial. For example, on one tutorial, the page number was something like 17, but the question number on the page said 27. Minor things like that plague the game, things that should have been caught before putting the game on the market. Despite all of this mind-boggling flaws, the game is still amazingly fun. Chess on its own exerts a peculiarly addictive force on all those who come in contact, and this game, in my mind, multiplies that force several times. With this game, you can participate in a lively, challenging game whenever you want, day or night. You don't have to bore yourself because your opponent doesn't feel like playing. Its always there. Consequently, I've played an enourmous amount of chess during the past two weeks, and I've profited from it immensely. When I first bought the game, I played a player named Jonesie, rated at 900 or so, and I was utterly annihilated. Now, only two weeks later, Jonesie is a breeze, and I rarely loose to players rated at 1450 and above. If your a beginning player who would like to become a serios competitor, this game is ideal. Look at my results. In two weeks I jumped 500 rating points. I can't wait to see how I'm doing two more weeks from now! In conclusion, buy this game if chess means anything to you at all. Although I've never played any other computer chess games before, I can't imagine them topping this one. Thank you Chessmaster.
Rating:
Summary: Exceeded my expectations
Review: I didn't know what to expect when I bought this program. Just another Chess software I thought. But Josh Waitzkin's 12 games at "Classroom Curriculum" have made all the difference for me. He is a very good chess player and a great narrator. I return to his 12 annotated games again and again for his lessons on chess strategy, psychological insight and sense of humor. Excellent program, I wish only there were more than 12 annotated games! No pressure, Josh!
Rating: 
Summary: Where's The Patch
Review: I had chessmaster 5000 and had much fun until I upgraded to win98 second edition,it wasn't fully compatible.
I bought Chessmaster 6000 for the o\s compatibility,it worked flawlessly.
I've now upgraded to Windows XP Pro which is NT based.I was told by several people that chessmaster 8000 would be XP and NT compatible so I bought it and it isn't.
I have only one question for UBI Soft,
WHERE IS THE PATCH!?
It's a good program,Dont make loyal customers waste so much money.
Rating:
Summary: Great Program! Never crashed in Win98SE...
Review: I have been using this program in a daily basis for the past year. I usually play more than ten matches a day. It works smoothly and the only thing that can be considered bad is that when Auto is selected in a Tournament (so that the computer players will play against each other without you having to choose each game individually), the faces of the players only appear on the third or fourth move. Since I have a 64Mb Pentium 200, I don't think this is so bad. On the other hand, this program helped me increase my rating from 1700 to almost 2100! The online lessons are awesome. The database is huge. And the Chessmaster is still a tough match (2700... 2900... who cares ?! I'll be beaten shamelessly anyway!)
Rating:
Summary: Fine program, but still a work in progress
Review: I have owned every Chessmaster since Chessmaster 2100, a charming little toy that ran on my old XT with an engine that played like a "D" player with poor positional judgment(!). Today's Chessmaster plays like something close to a Grandmaster. It is a fine program with some annoying bugs, suitable for a wide range of players from beginners to master-level players. It is not, however, the choice of professionals. They prefer the elegant German-made Fritz since some of CM's features for the average player are of no interest to them. Unless you are a Senior Master level player however, in my opinion, Chessmaster is a better choice because of its many features. Nonetheless Chessmaster 8000 is not much of an improvement on Chessmaster 7000. (You might want to read my review of CM7000 because some of the same comments apply here). In some ways CM8000 is a regression. For example, you can't run the program at all without the disk in your CD drive. Ouch! In CM7000 you could at least run the program for 14 days or 28 sessions before being required to insert the CD. Another problem is that the sight and music show after CM8000 loads always plays and you have to hit a key to get to the program. This is also a regression from CM7000 which allowed you to turn off this it-gets-old-fast "feature." A new bug occurs when you play a game at a fast time limit. The verbal announcement of moves is truncated so that CM's move is not announced. This is a bug that CM is aware of but hasn't fixed yet. Another regressive change is you can no longer pick the exact color of the chessboard. That feature has been eliminated, why I don't know. The Think Lines window, though, has been improved. Now you can play over a game and see how Chessmaster evaluates the game without toggling between the Chessmaster mode and the player mode as in CM7000 and previous editions. Just click Chessmaster in the window and CM's thinking is always there. The "mate in one" opening puzzle has been "improved" to offer avoid mate and find the pin and find the fork. This is still not anywhere near what it should be. At least a mate in two would improve, or even better, critical positions from master games could be featured so that the user could compare his or her choice with what was actually played. The personality ratings are still a little high. One personality rated around 2200 on my machine often sac's a piece for two united pawns in the opening. Other personalities routinely give up a pawn and then some, but are also rated at around master-level. "Natalie," rated 2296 on my machine, gives up at least a pawn in the opening and in general plays the opening like a "D" player, yet plays afterwards like a master. Not realistic! But as someone at CM pointed out, one of the interesting things about the personalities is that they have weaknesses that a human can discover and take advantage of. I think a little more creativity in creating the personalities would improve the program. I like eccentrics like "Vlad" who always answers almost instantly because he just doesn't search any further than about three ply. The only player stats kept are those in rated games. Stats reflecting performance in EVERY game should be kept. It would required just the slightest effort on the part of the programmers to offer such a feature. And such a feature would be very revealing (and perhaps sobering) for the player. Every game should be counted as (1) Incomplete with CM's score given at the time of abandonment; (2) Won, lost or drawn. An annoyance is that CM doesn't remember your place in the scroll windows. In other words, if you are playing through a long list of games it would be nice when you click "Load" for the window to open where you left off so you can just click the next game on the list. However what CM does is make you start all over again because it always opens the window to the first game on the list. Another silly annoyance is when you're going from one mode to the other, the program ought to recall and use the chessboard and set that you have chosen. Instead CM uses its default and you have to choose all over again. Here's what I think would be a significant improvement: Add some code that would assess a player's strength based on an analysis of every move played, so that a rating could be established with just a couple of games. To illustrate what I mean, consider that in any given position there are "x" number of moves. Of those moves, a certain number lose outright (let's say lose the equivalent of two pawns or more, all the way to possibly allowing checkmate). Some others give away somewhere between the equivalent of half a pawn to a pawn and a half. Still others keep the chances about the same, while others might result in an advantage. Since the program keeps a running "score" of the game, it could simply compare each of the human player's moves with a change in the running score and easily construct a hierarchy of achievement or lack thereof which could be converted into ratings. This could be turned into a feature that would assess a player's strength for just the current session. After all, we all have days when we are "on" and other days when we don't play so well. I love the Chessmaster program perhaps because I am used to it and perhaps because when I was a young chess player there were no programs at all. It is a fine program, but it is still a work in progress.
Rating:
Summary: Fine program, but still a work in progress
Review: I have owned every Chessmaster since Chessmaster 2100, a charming little toy that ran on my old XT with an engine that played like a "D" player with poor positional judgment(!). Today's Chessmaster plays like something close to a Grandmaster. It is a fine program with some annoying bugs, suitable for a wide range of players from beginners to master-level players. It is not, however, the choice of professionals. They prefer the elegant German-made Fritz since some of CM's features for the average player are of no interest to them. Unless you are a Senior Master level player however, in my opinion, Chessmaster is a better choice because of its many features. Nonetheless Chessmaster 8000 is not much of an improvement on Chessmaster 7000. (You might want to read my review of CM7000 because some of the same comments apply here). In some ways CM8000 is a regression. For example, you can't run the program at all without the disk in your CD drive. Ouch! In CM7000 you could at least run the program for 14 days or 28 sessions before being required to insert the CD. Another problem is that the sight and music show after CM8000 loads always plays and you have to hit a key to get to the program. This is also a regression from CM7000 which allowed you to turn off this it-gets-old-fast "feature." A new bug occurs when you play a game at a fast time limit. The verbal announcement of moves is truncated so that CM's move is not announced. This is a bug that CM is aware of but hasn't fixed yet. Another regressive change is you can no longer pick the exact color of the chessboard. That feature has been eliminated, why I don't know. The Think Lines window, though, has been improved. Now you can play over a game and see how Chessmaster evaluates the game without toggling between the Chessmaster mode and the player mode as in CM7000 and previous editions. Just click Chessmaster in the window and CM's thinking is always there. The "mate in one" opening puzzle has been "improved" to offer avoid mate and find the pin and find the fork. This is still not anywhere near what it should be. At least a mate in two would improve, or even better, critical positions from master games could be featured so that the user could compare his or her choice with what was actually played. The personality ratings are still a little high. One personality rated around 2200 on my machine often sac's a piece for two united pawns in the opening. Other personalities routinely give up a pawn and then some, but are also rated at around master-level. "Natalie," rated 2296 on my machine, gives up at least a pawn in the opening and in general plays the opening like a "D" player, yet plays afterwards like a master. Not realistic! But as someone at CM pointed out, one of the interesting things about the personalities is that they have weaknesses that a human can discover and take advantage of. I think a little more creativity in creating the personalities would improve the program. I like eccentrics like "Vlad" who always answers almost instantly because he just doesn't search any further than about three ply. The only player stats kept are those in rated games. Stats reflecting performance in EVERY game should be kept. It would required just the slightest effort on the part of the programmers to offer such a feature. And such a feature would be very revealing (and perhaps sobering) for the player. Every game should be counted as (1) Incomplete with CM's score given at the time of abandonment; (2) Won, lost or drawn. An annoyance is that CM doesn't remember your place in the scroll windows. In other words, if you are playing through a long list of games it would be nice when you click "Load" for the window to open where you left off so you can just click the next game on the list. However what CM does is make you start all over again because it always opens the window to the first game on the list. Another silly annoyance is when you're going from one mode to the other, the program ought to recall and use the chessboard and set that you have chosen. Instead CM uses its default and you have to choose all over again. Here's what I think would be a significant improvement: Add some code that would assess a player's strength based on an analysis of every move played, so that a rating could be established with just a couple of games. To illustrate what I mean, consider that in any given position there are "x" number of moves. Of those moves, a certain number lose outright (let's say lose the equivalent of two pawns or more, all the way to possibly allowing checkmate). Some others give away somewhere between the equivalent of half a pawn to a pawn and a half. Still others keep the chances about the same, while others might result in an advantage. Since the program keeps a running "score" of the game, it could simply compare each of the human player's moves with a change in the running score and easily construct a hierarchy of achievement or lack thereof which could be converted into ratings. This could be turned into a feature that would assess a player's strength for just the current session. After all, we all have days when we are "on" and other days when we don't play so well. I love the Chessmaster program perhaps because I am used to it and perhaps because when I was a young chess player there were no programs at all. It is a fine program, but it is still a work in progress.
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