And while it offers some new features, you can pretty much read our reviews of the previous games and substitute "10" for "8000" or "9000."
#Dgt board with chessmaster 10 update#
Chessmaster 9000 added even more teaching tools and brought back the much-missed Chessmaster Live multiplayer options.Ĭhessmaster 10 includes yet another update for the King AI system, more learning courses, a less cumbersome interface and a pair of 3D glasses. And while that game's switch to 16-bit graphics made it stand out a bit from the previous versions, you'd be hard pressed to say that the improvement made that big of a difference in terms of your enjoyment of the game. Chessmaster 8000 added the new King AI system and introduced a lot of teaching tools. So how do you keep the series fresh? Going back over previous versions, I can definitely see some incremental improvements. And where Microsoft's Flight Simulator series necessitates almost yearly editions to keep pace with improvements in graphics technology, chess games don't (and shouldn't) sell on the strength of their visuals.
While it makes some sense that successive iterations of Madden can tweak the action somewhat, that flexibility just doesn't exist in the more abstract, straightforward world of chess. Each edition of Chessmaster is better than the last but the world of computerized chess hardly requires four separate editions over five years. So while we can say that Chessmaster 10th Edition is the best chess game in town, it simply doesn't add enough over any of the last two versions to make it a necessary upgrade. The essential contradiction at the heart of this review is this: While I think Chessmaster is simply the best chess program available, the small list of new features added to each iteration make it hard to recommend the new version over the previous one.