Rating: 
Summary: Worth it
Review: It plays well and has many choices. My favorite part is the Kids Room. It is fun and has many different levels to choose from. I reccomend you get this game now!!!
Rating: 
Summary: chess master 8000 hangs on win2k...
Review: Just for the record, I use Win2K, and the computer hangs in the middle of the games. very annoying.
Rating:
Summary: An awesome way to learn
Review: Most people really enjoy making fun of Chessmaster 8000, saying that other engines like Fritz 6 and Shredder are a lot stronger. However, personally I don't care if I'm beaten in chess by a 2600+ engine or a 2700+ engine. Chessmasters true advantage lies in its easy-to-learn approach. Often in other engines the interface and the menus are hard to navigate through, and if you have a child they easily become discouraged by playing against such an engine. But in Chessmaster 8000 you have everything to make you play better. If you have a child that's interested in chess, he/she can play in the "Kids room" where there are exercises, voice lectures by IM Josh Waitzkin and tonnes of opponents, from rating 1 to rating 2200. If you are a teenager like me, or an adult, you might want to move on to the "game room" where you can play the same opponents as in the kids room, but in this case their USCF rating goes as high as 2700, with more than 170 different players, including 80+ human-like players, 39 opponents based and styled after famous grandmasters, and the CHESSMASTER himself, expected to play at 2600 USCF, when playing at full strength, and if that's not enough, you can create your own characters, set their strengths and weaknesses, and you can even incorporate other chessengines into chessmaster, such as Crafty. Furthermore you can play the masters such as Kasparov, Lasker, Capablanca, Nimzowitz, Larsen and Botvinnik, and you can have your game analysed by chessmaster, so that he points out where you went wrong, and where you did the right move. He can even during a game suggest the best move to you, or he can go into dept and try to find a forced mate. You can also pair computers vs. computers, play rated and unrated tournaments in the tournament room, look up EVERY opening and see comments to it in the "library room", check out classic games (more than 700) with annotation by Grandmasters, including Yasser Seirawan and Larry Evans, hear voice lectures from Joshua Waitzkin, solve exercises from mate in 1 to highly advanced Master exercises, you can go online and play against other users of chessmaster 8000 (and no it's not possible to cheat during play), there's a giant database with over 500000 chess games played throughout history, you can search for ELO, player, tournament, position etc. The graphics are 16-bit and you can choose from 33 different chessboards, in "birds eye view", "over the shoulder view", "3D", "Perspective" or the traditional "2D". You can also chose the pieces. If you are not satisfied, you can create your own board. There's nothing that you can't do in chessmaster, and the lectures by Bruce Pandolfini, Seirawan and Waitzkin are of top quality, and most of them are read aloud! This is like having your own personal IM or GM at your disposition at any time. Chessmaster 8000 is an awesome and fun way to learn chess, recommendable to children, teenagers or adults! If you're 400, buy this game, if you're 1500, buy this game, if you're a grandmaster, yes, buy this game, seeing it is grandmaster strength. This is definitely the best chess engine ever.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good program with a few design idiocies
Review: My young daughter showed an interest in chess, so I thought I'd get us a chess program. Chessmaster 8000 is a good program and fun to use. As a teaching program for kids or adults it has a few very annoying flaws:
1) You can't pick up the (great) tuturial lessons where you left off. If you're at step 24 of a tutorial, and you stop, you need to resume from step 1.
2) The program is not keyboard friendly (on Windows 2000 at least). Alt keys don't work, and there's way too much clicking.
Rating: 
Summary: Raghuraman
Review: Not a good Chess engine. Try Fritz 6 or Shredder or Junior 6, they play much better game than this program.Shredder is the current World Chess Champion (machine). I am not sure whether ChessMaster was ever tried for World Championship. Programs like Fritz 6, Deep Fritz are used for enjoying the game and at the same time used by experts for anotating & analyzing Games. Fritz 6 was extensively used to analyze games being played during Fide World Championship etc. Bugs, crashes are not heard of those programs. They run on all the Windows OS. You get very decent programs on these sites.
Rating:
Summary: Very good Tool, but needs improvements to work with W2k
Review: Ok, it's not normal to have a computer configured as a Windows 2000 Server, and to install Chessmaster there.
I have read that on the manufacturer of the software side, there are no possibilities to support Windows 2000, nor XP. But on the other side, there are reviews here telling it works under Windows 2000.
I buyed it.
But then, I installed the software on my home-work computer, where I work and that I also use on my free time. But my kind of job makes it necessary to work with Windows 2000 Server.
It was frustrating to see that it doesn't work there, after having installed it. I tried then downloading the last version of DirectX, then by installing it told me, DirectX had to be installed, in order to work with. But it didn't work. I get the message "A fatal error ocurred initializing Sound playback. The program will now terminate.", and it terminates...
I installed then it on other partition on the same computer, that I had only for test purposes, but that works with Win 98. There it works very fine. Good, I don't like to insert the CDs each time I want to play, but maybe it's some kind of protection from the manufacturer side. It's not nice.
But on the other side, going to the game, it's very nice. I'm learning a lot with it, and having fun. Find very good to play against personalities with different levels.
It would be nice having the game in other languages (my mother language is spanish), but for me is also good so.
I find Chessmaster has a very high level in general, and knew it from version CM2000. I know other chess products, and they have a very low level, or no level, compared with Chessmaster.
I hope, better I'm sure, my chess level will grow a lot now.
Rating:
Summary: Misguided programmers?
Review: One is tempted to use the rating of play any Chess computer has as a measure of it's "goodness." A move from 2700 to 2900 is quite a jump and would seem to be a selling point. It isn't. At least not for 95+% of us. For that rare few that happened to be 2800, it's the all important thing but for the vast majority of us, programming energies would be better spent elsewhere. And for me, personally, 2700 vs 2900 is a complete and total non-issue. Though for those cheating on the internet, this is quite and advantage. I can't wait 'til everyone is bored with cheating. Better places for programmer time: 1) Stability, stability, stability. Oh, and did I mention stability? 2) How about a better "game analyzer." The game analysis has been invaluable in my chess improvement but I'm pushing its envelop and I'm no where near the 2700+ rating range. Personally, this is my MAIN concern but I've listed it as #2 because I believe more people would be interested in stability. 3) Fluff like: a) forcing a computer to use a specified opening line, b) the *option* of speeding up a lower level opponent so I don't have to wait 60+ seconds for a computer opponent to make a relatively easy move, c) automatic opponent changes given an improving user (based on win/loss ratio, etc - with a smidgen of randomness involved), d) this one is truly fluff but how about the ability to load an image in for a custom made opponent and similar "fun" customization features?
Rating:
Summary: Stay with Chessmaster 7000 and save your money
Review: One of the appeals to Chessmaster used to be the "auto-annotation" mode so a player could enter a game and Chessmaster would analyze move by move and offer better moves. This feature made Chessmaster worthwhile. Then came 8000. This feature is gone. Chessmaster will analyze the game but you can not print it out. Bummer!!!! While the tutorials are nice, they are not that much better than the 7000 so why spend the extra money. Of course, there are the problems with more advanced Windows operating systems and now why buy this product at all. If you are a parent trying to teach your children to play, look for Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess. A far superior product.
Rating:
Summary: Re: Correction
Review: Regarding compatibility problems, I advise caution: you may find you get to some point in the game or other features and then the problems crop up. UBI Soft is, frankly, stupid for not immediately and fully supporting Windows 2000 and XP, for this title as well as older versions of Chessmaster (and Riven, etc.) so that customers who upgrade OSes don't lose hundreds of dollars of good software. For my part, I'm considering picking up an old 98/ME machine because (a) we could use a 2nd PC and (b) I want to play Myst 3!
Rating:
Summary: Stick with Chessmaster 7000
Review: Stick with Chessmaster 7000 at least it will run 90% of the time. I have 7000 and at least I can play games with it. Just bought Chessmaster 8000 and out of 4 games on the 4 or fifth move my computer locked up each time (4 times). I can't get it to play a complete game. I had no problem going through the classrooms. But, that is not what I bought 8000 for I thought it would be better than 7000. NO WAY!!!!!
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