Chessmaster 9000 finally goes Universal

Brad Gibson of Feral Interactive wrote:

"In actual fact, the DVD/CD is only required to be in the drive to launch the game but not to play it.

We hope this is a positive that will help you to re-consider purchasing Chessmaster 9000."

This turns out to be true. But here's my experience:

(i) I just bought my first Mac a month ago, and ChessMaster was the first piece of software i bought for it. It was un-launchable, crashing every time. This was my intro to the world where software is supposed to "just work".

(ii) Feral's instructions for tech support say to upgrade to the latest patch first. The first piece info you'll see on their site says the latest patch costs about as much money as the original product did. If you dig deeper, this turns out to not be necessary. It put me off for a while and left me pretty annoyed with them. If I were running Feral's marketing and PR I'd be taking a look at the web page from a customer's point of view.

(iii) There are several patches on the website. While they do have numbers, they don't tell you which ones apply to your version. You have to dig into the details of each download to check which can be applied to the version you have installed.

(iv) When you dig into the details of the 2nd of these patches, it mentions that it fixes a known problem with the program failing to start on newer MacBooks. Given that the people this applies to have just spent their money on Feral's product and had a lousy first experience, you might think that Feral would be helpful to these people in a bid to restore some faith and credibility. Something like "Owners of new MacBooks may experience problems starting ChessMaster. Click here for help". In fact the info is buried in the details of the 2nd download off the patches page off the product page off the main page.

(v) When you get the program to stop crashing on startup you discover you need the DVD to run the program. For many users, that's an irritation. For a MacBook Air user like me, it's an extreme irritation and a show-stopper. And if you read the Feral's user guide, you won't realize you can unplug the DVD after starting the program because Feral didn't think that was something you'd want to know. You'll assume it's going to reference the DVD sometime when it's running. If and only if you come to a forum like this one will you find out that you can unhook the DVD and play chess on your commute.

(vi) My MacBook had been working flawlessly without missing a beat until I ran ChessMaster. For example, I would have Aperture, Preview, Safari, Firefox, and a Virtual Machine running Windows XP doing development in Windows Presentation Foundation, all simultaneously, all without any problem. But ChessMaster managed to hang my system - and before you ask, not all those apps were running at the time. What part of ChessMaster crashed it? Believe it or not, the quiz at the end of the first beginners' lesson. Seriously. Just doing a little quiz on the rules of chess froze the system. Tabbing between apps wouldn't work, the Apple menu wouldn't work, the system completely stopped responding to all keyboard and mouse events. For the first time since I bought the Air I had to reboot it and I had to use the power button to do it.

One more thing - and it's a small point but it says something about thr developers. The program includes lessons. The lesson consists of a game board and an instruction window which describes what's happening in the game board. Now if you were designing this, would you place the window over the game board, obscuring it?

Brad Gibson, marketing & PR for Feral, finished his post with this:

"We hope this is a positive that will help you to re-consider purchasing Chessmaster 9000."

In turn, I hope my own experience helps you make an informed purchasing decision.

Cheers

Peter

It's one of the last remaining 'holes' in the Mac OS market. There simply is no chess program available that is really good. One of the reasons that I didn't buy CM 9000 is that you can only run the program with the DVD/CD in the drive. I really hate that. I wrote to the developer of Sigma Chess, but he's not going to upgrade it.

So please, can someone bring out a GREAT chess program for the Mac, PLEASE?

It's over 9,000!

Doesn't OS X come with two free chess programs as it is? Big Bang Chess and OS X Chess?

How much chess do you need on you Mac?