Battle Chess 4000

     Battle Chess 4000, $60 list, is the latest version of Interplay's
     animated chess program for the IBM. It runs with Super VGA color only,
     and you need 13Mb of disk space.

     For those of you unfamiliar with Battle Chess, the pieces move by
     normal rules and then give battle for contested squares on the board.
     (Though the action is fast and furious, the winner and loser are
     decided by the rules of the game.)

     In a way Battle Chess mirrors the use of living pieces in games
     played at court in the Renaissance and late Middle Ages. Earlier
     versions of the program reflected that even more closely by using
     animated medieval figures -- yeomen, bishops, knights in armor, etc.
     -- who fought each other with sword, ax and morning star.

     But times change, eh? Battle Chess 4000 uses figures from outer space.
     Bishops are mad scientists, knights are space rangers and aliens with
     blasters, and the queen is a refugee from Amazon Women on the Moon.
     The board is a space station.

     Animation is a process often called Claymation and popularized by the
     California Raisins TV commercial. Levels of play go from novice to
     grand master.

     If you think a desktop computer can't match strides with a chess grand
     master, you've been out of town for a while. New programs, such as
     this one and ChessMaster 3000 from Software Toolworks, are able to
     beat grand masters. They're also surprisingly popular: Both appear
     regularly on the top 10 list for entertainment sellers.

     Battle Chess 4000 has more than 300,000 opening moves. In a twist that
     is definitely unfair to humans, the program will add your moves to
     its data bank if it thinks they are particularly clever. It's true
     that people have larger data banks than any computer, but our
     retrieval system has some glitches. Oh well, that's the way the
     galaxy turns.