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Don't buy if you have clone software installed on your pc

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 497 / 534
Date: September 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game refused to start on my pc. It stated that I had a CD\DVD emulation software on my pc and it had to be removed. Ubisoft copy protection is to blame. It looks for any clone software such as CloneCD, Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools, etc., that use CD\DVD emulation. If it finds any it will not start the program even though you have the original Ubisoft cd in the drive. What they are doing is telling you what you can and cannot have on your own computer. After I found this out, I brought my Chessmaster 10 back to Best Buy. The computer tech geek there was so upset when I explained and showed him why there was a problem that he gave me a full refund despite a store policy of no refunds on open software. He said he had some of this same clone software on his own pc. As for me, Ubisoft has lost a customer. Never again will I buy their software.

Beware

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 601 / 672
Date: August 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I would love to be able to buy this game. But the pain outweighs the benefits. First they put such powerful copy protection on this, that many or most CD-RW/DVD-RW drives will NOT work to install or play the game from.

This is because they have DISABLED them. Well, gosh, thanks a lot! My laptop ONLY COMES with a CDRW drive! PLUS, even if I could install the game, I have to have the game CD in the drive at all times. Which means it will be spinning my CD all the time, sucking down my battery in far less than an hour.

Thanks guys.

So I want to buy this so I can play it while I'm out and about, waiting for meetings or just at the park....and I can't. AND even if I COULD, the CD will have to be up and spinning?

This is unacceptable! Tell me, how many laptops come with only straight CD or JUST strait DVD drives now? I don't know of any.

I say tell them to KEEP thier stupid program. This company doesn't own every single good chess programmer in the world. There are plenty of other companies that make good products. Buy one from any of them.

If you can't play the game you purchased where and whenever you want--Then Tell Chessmaster to shove thier product. They are not serving you. So don't serve THEM.

Great tutorials, short on other useful features

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 110 / 113
Date: August 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I am curious to see what other people think about this piece of software, so please put your opinions forth!

I am a regular chess tournament player, and familiar with CM7000. Before reading my review, understand that it comes from a player who regular uses computers to analyze games for tactical errors, store/analyze games from book collections, and competes regularly in USCF tournaments at a 1600 level.

CM10th seems to have more streamlined graphics from prior versions, and a smoother overall feel. I've run into 1-2 hiccups when running CM with other programs, but it generally feels very stable.

The best part of CM 10th are the tutorials, hands down. Waitzkin's writing is perfect for both beginners and intermediate players, and the CM interface with its arrows and colored squares truly shines with him at the helm. Larry Christiansen's games are also excellent, but the great depth of his analysis is a bit harder to follow as he goes through the various lines in real time. It seems from other readers that CM9000 replicates most of these tutorials - if so, unfortunately the main reason for buying CM10th may not be sufficiently compelling. However, for those who haven't worked with these tutorials, they singlehandedly justify purchasing CM 10th - even with no other features, I could wholeheartedly recommend purchasing the software just for these lectures.

Another huge plus where CM10th excels is in the "play" department, which makes it most suitable for those who just want to play lots of games. CM's interface makes it a breeze to pick up and play rated opponents, which do get progressively more difficult as their rating climbs. I have not played enough games to truly assess the player strength relative to tournament ELO, but suffice to say that the computer still completely fails in replication of human play - CM 1500 rated opponents will hang pieces by putting them right in front of your pawn with no compensation whatsoever - not even an 800 USCF player would play such ridiculous moves! The engine will promptly rev up and play 5-7 dazzling positional moves in a row to generate a crushing attack while down an entire piece (verified by Fritz to be GM-strength moves!) only to repeat the hanging of pawns and pieces just when you think you should resign. Fritz's friend/sparring mode, although really dry (it's not that exciting to beat Fritz 7 in -1 pawn mode versus CM's colored personalities), plays incredibly humanistic chess in comparison.

As a serious chess player familiar with Fritz and computer analysis, I have some major concerns that inhibit me from recommending CM10th as my main tool/engine.

Big problems:

- The disc is required EVERY time you boot the game. Not even a 14-day recharge period like CM7000 - you need it each and every time. Laptop users take the biggest hit here, as the wear and tear on the drive and battery drain is pretty significant.

- The menu interface is still just ugly and really inefficient. Instead of using "normal" WinXP menus, CM goes with its custom colors/fonts/pulldown screens. Even more importantly, shrinking game status windows doesn't scale the font, so opening more than 2 game status windows gets REALLY cluttered. In contrast, Fritz's windows are super-streamlined, and you can make the font as tiny as you want - I routinely have 5 panels open in Fritz with a huge 2D board, whereas doing the same on CM is absolutely impossible. (To compensate, CM does have a Ctrl-tab to toggle hide all windows)

- No keyboard customization. This is HUGE for serious players who want full control of game analysis. The lack of arrow key navigation in game playback (you have to use control keys) is painful, and the most basic functions require multiple mouse clicks. Contrast to Fritz, where you can customize nearly every function to a key, so you can spend all your time on the chess and none of the time on the interface.

-Replaying analysis in CM10th is still as painful as it was in prior versions. While CM provides excellent auto-annotation, it's still too difficult to play back the variations (hit play, and the computer starts autoplaying the moves while you struggle to keep up...) Fritz's method of embedding variations right into the game score so you can play right through them at your own pace and then get back to the main game instantly is vastly easier. As an example, I will analyze an online game in Fritz for blunders by running analysis on it, and then all of the "recommended lines" it comes up with for my mistakes are embedded as variations in the game. I can then play through them rapidly, and see the actual engine's score evaluation to see how badly I blundered. This is all possible in CM, but is still really clunky.

-As stated in prior reviews, online play is still virtually nonexistent, although the online teaching tools are quite promising (although nobody's using them yet.)

Conclusion:

-CM is worth every penny if you haven't seen the Waitzkin tutorials yet. Reconsider if you've done them already in prior versions.

-This game will appeal to new/beginning players who don't spend much time analyzing games and like to just play lots of different personalities.

-The Fritz interface is much more streamlined and efficient in nearly all aspects of the game, making it easily the better tool for tournament players or anyone who spends significant time on analysis of games.

-The personalities still play really strange chess (what's up with the ludicrous sacrifices?!), and I seriously question their ELO calibers relative to human USCF ratings - yesterday I easily defeated 1700,1800,1900, and drew a 2000 rated CM opponent while I run into serious problems against A class players in UCSF tournaments. At least from where I'm from, I would estimate the CM ratings as inflated by at least 200 points relative to the tournament players here.

-Online play is still nonexistent.

Would love to hear from all users - I especially anticipate that some CM "experts" will have creative solutions to some of the major problems I ran into, and I'd love to see how they've solved them.

Good luck to all you budding chessmasters!
hhnngg

Like to play chess online? Then avoid this.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 48 / 51
Date: August 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The achilles heal of the Chessmaster series has always been it's frustrating, buggy, and overall unusable online component. 7000 and 9000 had barely-there online play that was plagued with disconnects and timeouts. As a result, they never developed much of a play community, and even if you COULD log on you rarely found anyone in the lobby to play against.

When I heard Chessmaster was getting a facelift for the 10th edition, I was hoping this issue would finally get addressed. Well, it hasn't. In fact it's gotten worse: I've had the program for a week and a half and I haven't been able to play a single game online. All my other online games, including other chess programs like Fritz, work just fine. We were told there would be a patch, and there was, but it failed to fix the problems. Now, supposedly, there will be another at some point in the future.

And to make matters worse, the thing Chessmaster always did RIGHT - create a stable and user-friendly digital atmosphere in which to play and study chess - has been bungled by the new design team. The functional 2-D sets, preferred by serious players because they're easier to analyze, have been all but eliminated in favor of flashy 3-D animated ones that look like Disney-fied versions of the old Battle Chess DOS app. The analysis and database features aren't as deep as previous versions. And the whole design is weighed down by cheap, pointless gimmicks - there's a "stereo 3D mode" and the program comes packed with a set of red/blue 3D glasses. Why does a chess program need that? It doesn't.

The program looks nice (assuming your system is near state-of-the-art; be warned that this program uses a TON of processor power) and the Josh Waitzkin tutorials - long a hight point - have been expanded. Those additions are welcome. But if Chessmaster wants to stay competitive against Fritz, which offers great, easy online play along with their terrific chess program, or even against Yahoo, which offers fairly good online chess for free - they REALLY need to get their act together. There's no excuse "for the world's most popular chess program" to have such a lousy online component.

Avoid this copy protected game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 42 / 47
Date: October 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you buy this game legally you will be treated like a pirate. UbiSoft has no respect for their customers. You must play the game with CD1 in the CD player even though it installed everything onto the hard drive during installation. The purpose for this I guess is to annoy customers. Why don't they check that you are using a legal CD at install time and let it go at that? No - you need the original CD every time you play. What happens if the original CD gets scratched or lost? I guess you're out of luck. Like I'd ever buy this game again.

And UbiSoft also prevents you from making backup copies of the CDs - in direct violation of US Copyright law which allows the customer to make backup copies for safekeeping.

To top it off - if UbiSoft discovers that you even have installed certain programs such as CloneCD or Alcohol 120 - it won't run even if you have the original CD in the drive! Can you imagine if Microsoft wouldn't run MS Word or Excel if they detected that you had installed Word Perfect or Open Office? Even if you had paid for a legal copy of the software? And it won't run even if the banned software is turned off and is not being used!

What a way to treat customers. Buy the software legally and then lose your rights as protected under US Copyright law, and be told what else you may install on your own computer! Even if you are not using the other software - just it's presence is a no-no in UbiSoft's eyes.

Any software pirate will get a cracked version of this program off the Net and play it happily. Its only the law abiding customers who are being screwed.

UbiSoft should take a look at the backlash that TurboTax had last year when they went to copy protection. Turbo Tax is abandoning copy protection from now on.

I will never buy any more UbiSoft software again until they get rid of this junk in their products. And its not like its even all that great anyway when you play it. The engine is not top of the line and as others have said - it frequently locks up and acts weird. Well worth copy protecting, right!

Software that dictates what's on your system!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 35 / 37
Date: November 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you buy this game legally you will be treated like a pirate. UbiSoft has no respect for their customers. You must play the game with CD1 in the CD player even though it installed everything onto the hard drive during installation. The purpose for this I guess is to annoy customers. Why don't they check that you are using a legal CD at install time and let it go at that? No - you need the original CD every time you play. What happens if the original CD gets scratched or lost? I guess you're out of luck. Like I'd ever buy this game again.

And UbiSoft also prevents you from making backup copies of the CDs - in direct violation of US Copyright law which allows the customer to make backup copies for safekeeping.

To top it off - if UbiSoft discovers that you even have installed certain programs such as CloneCD or Alcohol 120 - it won't run even if you have the original CD in the drive! Can you imagine if Microsoft wouldn't run MS Word or Excel if they detected that you had installed Word Perfect or Open Office? Even if you had paid for a legal copy of the software? And it won't run even if the banned software is turned off and is not being used!

What a way to treat customers. Buy the software legally and then lose your rights as protected under US Copyright law, and be told what else you may install on your own computer! Even if you are not using the other software - just it's presence is a no-no in UbiSoft's eyes.

Any software pirate will get a cracked version of this program off the Net and play it happily. Its only the law abiding customers who are being screwed.

UbiSoft should take a look at the backlash that TurboTax had last year when they went to copy protection. Turbo Tax is abandoning copy protection from now on.

I will never buy any more UbiSoft software again until they get rid of this junk in their products. And its not like its even all that great anyway when you play it. The engine is not top of the line and as others have said - it frequently locks up and acts weird. Well worth copy protecting, right!

Apply the latest patch for better play

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 27 / 27
Date: December 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Go to the Ubisoft website and look for the latest ChessMaster patch.

After installing the v1.03 patch for ChessMaster 10th Edition, the game no longer requires the CD to run. It looks like the patch updates most of the game files, so the CD is no longer needed each time you play. Or maybe they loosened the CD verification requirements.

Of course, hang on to the CDs -- you might need them in the future.

After buying software, I always recommend that you look on the manufacturer's website, download and install the latest patches. In this case, the product is much easier to use after the patch.

It dosen't work on CD/Writer or Burner

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 35 / 39
Date: September 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

After I loaded the game on my Laptop, it never could start with the CD constantly spinning in my CD rom. According to their tech support at NC, it won't work on CD burner for the sake of illegal duplication. His suggestion was that I need to buy an external plain CD rom to play this game. This info should have been printed on their product box!!!!!

Dont Buy CM 10th Edition .... CM9K is much better.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 47 / 59
Date: August 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Don't buy Chessmaster 10th Edition. I'm not saying this because I don't like Chessmaster, in fact
I own CM7000 and CM9000 as well as competitors like Fritz 8. I am a regular club player and I tell
all my friends to buy CM9000 because all in all I like it better than Fritz 8 (which is what most
serious chessplayers like.). The only thing I didn't like about CM9000 is that the program crashed fairly
often on my XP machine (but doesnt on my 98 machine). I was hoping that CM10K would be a more stable
version at least and have some interesting updates and features.

I pre-ordered it and received it yesterday with great anticipation and spent 3 hours with it and boy was I dissapointed. I tried
and tried but there's nothing in this version that I like. To start off with, after I logged in and chose
to play a game, the environment colors and the "skin" motif that was defaulted to was a bit annoying for me
so I naturally went to change it to something more suitable, but there were only 4 or so skins to choose
from and some wouldnt let you pick them because I hadnt won 20 or 40 games yet???? How ridiculous. Then
I settled for one and went to choose a chess set and board that I was familiar with in CM9K and liked very
much, and they didn't carry over most of the sets from the last program and stayed with too many of these
cheesy esoteric chess pieces that are goofy and hard to concentrate with because they look nothing like a
real chess set. And here too, the one that I liked the best wouldnt let me choose it because I hadnt won
enough games yet??? Stupid. Then I couldn't find any way to turn off the squares from highlighting when
you move the pieces which was annoying. And it went on and on. At the end of the night, I couldn't find
one reason to ever click the icon again. Total and absolute dissapointment.

I can't believe most of the people above liked this version. Save your money, or at a minimum buy CM9K
which I still feel is Number One, hands down.

Not as good as advertised

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 27 / 28
Date: February 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Approximately two weeks ago, I received the updated version of the popular program. I have played with it quite a bit, used the various features, etc.

This is the fantastic new software by Ubisoft, CM has now been around for quite a while.

The software itself IS excellent, there are many training tools that you can use. (The tutorials by IM Waitzkin, GM Christiansen, etc.) The program is very powerful, a friend sent me a copy of a {chess} beta-program - I tested it in a brief match, the games were at a time-limit of 15 per game, plus 3 seconds a move. ChessMaster routed its opponent: six wins, one draw, no losses. I would venture to say that no human ... save for maybe one of the "Top 50" players in the world, even stand a chance of ever defeating this program. (And at fast time controls, chess programs are simply untouchable.)

I could take up pages with what is right about this program, there is plenty of eye candy too. 3-D sets galore, and a lot of other stuff that you could play around with forever. The average amateur could probably enjoy this program for a lifetime.

But I am a serious chess player, I like to both play AND analyze games. And this program is a LONG way from perfect. So let's discuss a few of the drawbacks of this program as well.

The chess sets are NOT that great, nor are they that easy to manipulate. The designers spent nearly all of their time on the 3-D sets, and people like me ... who prefer 2-D ... are pretty much left out in the cold. Very often you cannot control the size or the color of the 2-D boards, the range of choices here is pathetic. (Especially when compared to the almost endless set of choices in the 3-D selection.)

I also like to play chess. I won't bore you with stories of past victories, other than to inform you that I have won dozens of events - at a variety of different time controls. (I was leading 5-0 when I had to drop out of a "U.S. Game-in-30-minutes Championship." And I was the U.S. Champion for "Game-in-60-minutes" for the Expert class in 1992.)

I thought I would enjoy playing CM ... and I did. Yet I feel it is my duty as a reviewer to point out things that I noticed were simply absurd in this program. The "personality" (T.C.) has a supposed rating of 1701, yet I found I could not defeat it in three-minute chess. It makes unsound sacrifices, sure. It plays bad openings sometimes as well. But in order to defeat it, you have to play PERFECT chess for 80-100 moves ... all the while insuring that you do not lose on time! The personality "Vlad" is also grossly under-rated. (1800) It will play WHOLE GAMES in 2-5 seconds at a three-minute time control. No that's not a mistake, an exaggeration, a misprint ... nor anything else. You can LOSE to "Vlad" at a game of 3-minute, (with no increment); and it will have used only 2 seconds on its clock!! There is simply no human alive that is capable of this trick. (I also recognize the play of this aspect of CM, many cheaters on the Internet use it to avoid detection of the full-blown program. The "Vlad" program also has a certain style of play and plays certain opening variants in a very specific, unique way.)

Another problem with CM is that I like to do analysis with the program, basically ask its advice at what move it might play in a certain position or opening line. There are several ways to simulate what I do in ChessBase with this program, but none of them are perfect. (Or easy.) Probably the best bet is to load the game or set up the desired position. Then using the "set up game" feature, you can make CM play itself, and stipulate the time limit. But there is no good way so "see" into its thinking processes as you can with several other programs.

And this brings us to the final, and for me - fatal - flaw in this program. It requires the disk to run the program ... ALL THE TIME! In other words, if the CD-ROM/DVD/disk isn't in the machine, you can't use the program. And this plain SUCKS!!! And it also undermines the basic Windows concept of "multi-tasking." And to make matters worse, after I run CM, I have to re-boot before I can run ChessBase again. (Some type of conflict. And after reading all of the other reviews here, I can see that I am NOT the only person to greatly object to this facet of the program!)

I posted a notice on my website. I asked users of this program to send me an e-mail, telling me what they thought. And to be honest, the feed-back has been positive ... probably 95% of the time. (Over 35 e-mails.) Which means you will probably buy and use this program ... and never notice the little ticks I have pointed out.

But - in my opinion, the flaws of this edition of this program ... far outweigh the potential benefits. (Yet many of my students enjoy it tremendously!)

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