Y’know, chess is boring. At least, 10 out of 10 ADHD 7 year olds agree. It’s a dry game of strategy that has known many incarnations. It takes patience, brains and foresight to play chess, and what was I talking about?

That’s where Interplay comes in. They took a look at The traditional game of chess and the ADHD 7 year old they keep chained to a desk and said to each other “What if the pieces . . . beat each other up?”

Therefore, when one piece takes another, they vanish from the board, appear in a small arena, and fight until someone dies (usually in a gruesome fashion) or has insufficient limbs to continue fighting.

I know what you’re thinking – Do I have any influence over the outcome of the battle? Is it, like, a chess fighting game?! Do they have different moves? Is it really BATTLE Chess?!! No. Oh no. Nothing like that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about NES games, it’s that the title usually has very little to do with what actually goes on in the game.

No, the outcome of the fight is entirely determined in the chess game. When One piece takes another, you’re treated to a small animation that displays the actual fight that goes on between the pieces. There’s an animation for every combination of pieces – Knight and rook, rook and pawn, king and queen, etc. etc. etc.

But that’s not all!! Not only do you get to see them fight, you get to see them WALK PAINSTAKINGLY TO THEIR NEW POSITIONS AAARGH WILL YOU JUST WALK A LITTLE FASTER SO WE CAN GET ON WITH THE GAME BLBAAAHHHH.

The actual game part (yeah, I should talk about that a little, I guess) of Battle Chess is rather simple – it’s a standard chess game with varying difficulties played in either 3-D battle chess mode or 2-D regular chess mode (without battle or moving animation). It’s the red pieces vs. the blue pieces. You can either choose to play against the computer or against another human. Or, if you really just want to see blood and gore, you can set one computer against itself.

So the pieces fight. In a totally pre-determined way. Yay. Yeah, I guess it’s kind of cool to see them duke it out, but you already know what’s going to happen, you just get to see the limbs fly, and that’s what this game is all about.

What liked: Yup. that’s chess arlight.

What disliked: Too much Marchy Marchy, not enough Slashy Slashy.

What to expect: Chess, a little battle, but mostly chess.

What's so different from this and other games of it's genre: The pieces fight. When you want them to, that is.

Ratings on:

Control: 10 (Nothing whatsovever wrong with it. It’s a chess game, so I HOPE no one would mess the controls up.)

Graphics: 4 (Sure the pieces beat each other up, but the animations can be rather hard to follow – sometimes you’re not exactly sure as to what has just occurred on screen, although you can be pretty sure that limbs were lost or eyes poked out.)

Sound: 2 (very basic. Not even any music. The sound of the pieces marching drove me to new levels of annoyance that not even a particularly poorly executed Phantom of the Opera song could elicit.)

Style: 1 (Chess with Battle. No style for you.)

Difficulty: Adjustable (As said above, difficulty can be changed)

3 minutes: Woa. They fight.

10 minutes: Can I conrol the fight?

11 minutes: I cannot control the fight.

15 minutes: This is Chess.

#1 reason why I hate this game: Is there any way I can see them fight without seeing them walk around first? No? Poo . . .

by a lot of mokeys or Freeohio