I imagine there were few things further from my mind than learning chess as I flicked through my new January 1989 copy of Computer & Video Games magazine as Christmas 1988 quickly approached. Buying proper Christmas presents for people, now I had a Saturday job, certainly was, introducing a whole new adult world I’d never thought about before but no doubt was weighing just as heavily as it has done ever since at that time of year; actually, I have a rule now that everything needs to be bought and ideally wrapped by the start of December so I can enjoy the run up to Christmas without worrying about it! I think my teenage generosity that year only extended as far as my Mum and Dad though, and at sixteen I was still way more about presents for me rather than presents for others. Which is something else that’s never changed! I did buy my Mum a really nice Chronicle of the 20th Century book that year though – 1500 hardback pages with an extravagant price to match but it was all the rage that year and was worth every penny.

Anyway, back to my lack of thought about chess, this was also my first sixth-form Christmas and the end of my first term of A-levels, which, by coincidence, my son has also just experienced as I write, although he’s playing football rather than anything as tediously academic as I did! And although it still felt like a dim and distant dream at the time, it would be my last Christmas as a ZX Spectrum owner because saving up for an Atari ST was where that part-time supermarket money was going next! I’d already been more than sold on that but for the time being I was still also more than open to the latest and greatest the Spectrum had to offer, and if anyone needed ideas for presents for me then the C&VG reviews of Thunder Blade and Robocop that month were making them sound like ideal candidates!

And then came the review for Battle Chess! It was up against another 16-bit chess game called Colossus X in the magazine, but while that offered a beautiful-looking take on the traditional game, Battle Chess also offered live action, and that’s what caught my attention… I might not have been nerdy enough for chess but this was effectively the outrageously cool hologram game in the Milllenium Falcon from Star Wars and definitely not boring old proper chess! Well, turned out it was that too, and I didn’t know the first thing about how to play, and the review said it wasn’t coming to the Atari ST anyway (at the time at least but we’ll come back to that) so it joined The New Zealand Story and Buggy Boy on that imaginary list of 16-bit games I always wanted but for one reason or another didn’t get until decades later.

My Atari ST coming out of hibernation around 2020 wasn’t that far removed from when I did eventually learn to play chess. Our son had been given a travel chess set for Christmas not long before that and decided he wanted to bring it on our skiing holiday to Austria not long after, which meant it was finally bite the bullet! Turned out it wasn’t quite as esoteric as I’d imagined when all the worst weirdos were off to chess club one lunchtime a week back at middle school either! And as those two planets colldided, and I was also putting together my curated list of all those Atari ST games I suddenly wanted to track down but didn’t have the means to get at the time, I made sure Battle Chess was on there.

I was soon to learn that tracking down a game and then getting it to work once I did was sometimes a different matter, but in general that’s down to disks giving up the ghost over time but the person selling them having no way of knowing that. It’s been an ongoing annoyance but it doesn’t happen often and I’ve not come across anyone who’s not immediately taken action to resolve the problem once it’s identified. However, in the case of Battle Chess, which it turns out did eventually get released on Atari ST, it kind of worked for a while, but unless you were on a 1040ST (with 1MB of RAM versus my 520ST with exactly half of that), you were required to perform a very convoluted system of creating backup disks from the disks in the box then running the game from those exclusively every time you play, according to the instructions at least. Not sure if I didn’t do something right or just got unlucky with disk degradation after all because it never worked consistently and now doesn’t work at all.

At that point I was using a MAC and had never had much luck getting either Atari ST or Amiga emulation to work well on there, so I kind of consigned Battle Chess back to the want to play one day pile again, but it wasn’t long before I got two more bites at the cherry, first with the Amiga A500 Mini, where it was a pack-in game when that arrived a couple of years later, and then the NES version on Interplay Collection 1 for Evercade. I’ll come back to the latter but for the purpose of what you’re reading now, it’s that Amiga version we’re going to be playing any time now, I promise! Before that though, I’ll just give my usual Mini and Evercade disclaimer that I’ve grabbed most screenshots using emulation (which I have since got working very nicely on my current Windows laptop) rather than subjecting you to crappy photos of my crappy TV screen…

Battle Chess was originally developed and released for the Amiga in 1988 by Interplay Productions, who you might know today as Interplay Entertainment, who you might also know for Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Planescape, Icewind Dale, Earthworm Jim and, er, ClayFighter (which I am actually very partial to!), among other things. As just said, I will come back to the Atari ST and NES versions I have now known very briefly later on, but at one time or another it was also released everywhere else too – 3DO, Archimedes, Applle, II, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, FM Towns, MAC, PC-98, X68000 and Windows, where it also got an enhanced version in 1991 with fancy VGA graphics and a symphonic soundtrack. And speaking of ClayFighter, I’ll quickly mention the sequels here! Firstly Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess from 1991, which was similar in design but based on xiangqi, or Chinese chess, and really is completely unfathomable to me this time so let’s move on to the second, Battle Chess 4000, which employed a sci-fi-infused clay-mation art style similar to the aforementioned fighting game. A third game, Battle Chess 3, did get as far as a prototype but then never saw the light of day.

Apart from the Amiga screenshots it sneakily contains, the back of my Atari ST Battle Chess box informs us we’re talking “an entire medieval world on the checkered field” with over 3 megabytes of 3D animations (on their own separate disk!) and digitised sound effects bringing chess to life. Pretty remarkably for the time, it’s also modem-compatible “for long distance games” while you can also play solo against the computer across ten levels of play, or against a friend, or just let the computer play itself! Now, while I might be known for occasionally doing that with a couple of baseball games where that’s also a regular feature, I think watching a computer play chess against itself is a step too far even for me! That said, “an opening library of 30,000 moves” sounds pretty cool, whatever it means, and you’ve got a traditional 2D view too (which I’ve never really used here but might be of use later when we come back to the NES version…), and finally the manual also includes the rules of chess for beginners.

Don’t worry though, I’m not going to bore anyone too much with the rules of chess here – if you’re remotely interested you already know! But in case you don’t, you’ve got a checkerboard with two opposing armies on each side, made up of kings, queens, rooks (castles), bishops, knights and a load of pawns. The objective is to take down the other side’s king by moving one piece per turn, each of which moves in a different way but cannot jump over or move through another piece (unless it’s a knight), or land on a square where you’ve already got a piece. Land on a square with an opponent on though and they’re taken off the board. The movement rules include things like pawns can only move directly forwards one square at a time (once they’re on the move) but can take out an enemy on a square diagonally next to it, while a knight can go forward or back two then across one, or a bishop can go as far as he likes diagonally, or a queen can go any way she chooses and so on. If you can get any one of your pieces in a position that would take out the king with the next move, that means he’s in “check” and needs to take avoiding action but if he can’t then it’s “checkmate” and game over.

The instructions actually do a fantastic job of explaining all of this very comprehensively, as well as guiding you through the three “phases” of a chess game, which is particularly handy for beginners. For example, in the opening phase, the first move should be a centre pawn; don’t move the same piece twice in a row unless it’s in a position to attack; move out your knights and bishops before your rooks and queen, and so on. Then in the middle phase you’re concentrating on attacking as much as possible, taking care of the now-cluttered central space and all the opponent’s attack possibilities after you’ve made your own move. And finally there’s the end-game, where you now have fewer pieces on the board so you might want to bring the king into attacking play as well as favour, for example, bishops over knights, who’ll give more strategic advantage at this stage. There’s obviously tons more here than I’ve just summarised, and despite an enormous appendix of impenetrable chess parlance on top, there’s also tons more to chess than a video game instruction manual can ever cover, but as its parting note says, it’s all nothing without playing the game, so let’s dive in!

One of the things I love about this Amiga Mini version is there’s absolutely no messing about getting into a game – there’s not even any loading or title screens, let alone a ton of disk swapping (or backing-up) – you’re just straight in with the board all laid out and your computer opponent ready to go in front of you! There is a loading screen if you’re playing old-school though, although I can see why the Mini version skipped it, but however you get there, it’s a beautiful sight once you do! Rather than traditional black and white pieces, you’ve got one set of lifelike, delicately lit and wonderfully detailed – in a very 16-bit way – set of characters, all far more identifiable than a regular chess piece, and thoughtfully coloured with blue or magenta sashes, cloaks, shields and so on. Gorgeous green marble board they’re all placed on too! Where the game really (and literally) comes alive, though, is in its animations. Firstly, every piece has its own movement animation, from the armour-restricted heavy shuffle of the knights to the playful glide of the curvaceous queen; the knights are great too because, as the only piece that can go past their own pieces, will unceremoniously shove them out of the way as they do so! The rook is really special too, beginning as a castle tower in its inert state because obviously a rook is a castle, but when it moves the bricks in the tower deconstruct and transform into this huge walking rock (or rook) monster with scary glowing eyes!

As impressive and individual as all that movement is, best of all is when one piece tries to take another’s square! Again, every single one doesn’t just have its own attack animation, but it has a different one for every single one of the opposition pieces, which in turn has its own death animation for every different type that befalls it. They’re all full of humour and reflect the character at play, where once again the knights are a real highlight because if they face-off against each other, you’ll get the full Monty Python Holy Grail routine, with one arm lopped-off first, then the other, so it starts kicking at the other knight before having each leg chopped off, leaving just an argumentative trunk raging on the ground! I think my favourite is queen takes bishop though, where she claps her hands, summons up some otherworldly magic and fires it in his direction, which then turns him into a skeleton that crumbles into a pile of bones at her feet. I’m not sure about 30,000 moves, but so much thought and care has gone into giving every element of this chess game way more character than you’ll ever see elsewhere!

None of it is intrusive either. Chess is hardly a frantic game but, as we’ll find out later, it would have been very easy for all this superfluous animation to get very old very quickly, particularly when you’re into the middle phase of a game and it’s happening most moves. It’s been balanced just right though, and very much stays part of the regular, thoughtful flow of a game of chess. And there’s always the 2D view if you do get fed up of it which, apart from blue and magenta pieces, is very much the traditional game of computer chess with equally traditional pieces that you’ve no doubt seen elsewhere. I’m certainly no expert, but the actual mechanics of game seem pretty authentic to me too. The computer player plays relatively aggressively, and will try to dominate a game early with power plays from the knights, then the rooks, before bringing the queen into play to cause chaos wherever she can. And I’m talking the lowest ranked difficulties too! It’s a gradual increase in challenge as you go up through them but I struggle enough at novice and level one, so can’t provide too much more insight on those!

Apart from that, the computer makes its moves within about thirty seconds maximum, which, like the real thing, is time you need to analyse the board and start to plan ahead, rather than time spent waiting. And it all seems perfectly fair, albeit it very good at making you feel like an idiot when your impatience or lack of forethought blows the last ten minutes of careful play! You can save any time though, and there’s a suggest a move option in the menu if you need a bit of help, and the difficulty can be moved up and down on the fly, so there’s always something there for all levels. You can switch between 3D and 2D any time you like too, as well as turn the sound effects on and off, which include sampled footsteps, the clanking of armour, the clashing of swords, the sounds of magic and various grunts. Having sampled sounds in anything – not least a chess game – was always very cool at the time, but today it’s nothing spectacular, apart from there being an impressive degree of individuality, much like we saw in the animations earlier. No music to speak of yet either…

You’ll be wanting to upgrade to the CD32 version if you do want a bit of medieval pageantry (as well as some never-ending, voice-acted chess piece animations!), which is fine standalone but when every piece also has its own bit of sampled music every time it moves, you’ll soon be glad of the option to turn off these fancier sounds! While we’re talking other versions, let’s quickly look at the other two I own, starting with the Atari ST, which, apart from slightly less heft to the sound effects, is effectively the same as the regular Amiga version, assuming you can ever get it to load! Then there’s the NES version, which is something I particularly like to play handheld on the Evercade EXP or their Super Pocket spin-off if I’m in the mood for a game of chess in front of the telly, although I think if the Amiga version was available on there too then that’s the version I’d play… In and of itself, on NES it’s a decent game of chess, just like the other versions. The presentation seems even more barebones but it’s all there, albeit with less detail in the characters, and various shades of white noise replacing most of the sound effects. All the pieces look good in their own right though, and they’ve got all the moves, and it’s the most vibrant version I’ve seen. But it’s so slow! Every single move takes forever to play out as the pieces plod across the board, then if it’s a knight making his way through his pieces, or one piece trying to take another square, you’ve then got the same again as they manoeuvre themselves around each other. And then you’ve got to transported away from the board and in front of a castle to watch the ensuing battle take place in a full-on, NES in all its glory cutscene, which also takes forever! It wouldn’t be so bad if it happened on the board like in other versions, giving you that time we mentioned earlier for analysis and planning, but it literally takes you out of the game instead, and it’s jarring to try and readjust once you’re back. Can’t turn it off in the settings this time either!

All the same, I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time playing it so it can’t be all that bad! If only 16-year old me could hear himself saying that. Would never have believed it! I am pretty fond of a game of chess anywhere now though, despite not really having the patience to be that methodical or strategic for as long as it demands, and therefore never likely to be any good at it! And behind the sheen, that’s kind of my favourite thing about Battle Chess – I know every other version of computer chess (and those mysterious old electronic ones you use to see in Argos catalogues before it) has catered for beginners through to experts, but I haven’t played them. And they don’t look like this does. And they’re not like being in Star Wars! But this does all of those things, as well as letting me win sometimes if I turn the difficulty down really low, so I can say without doubt it’s my favourite chess game, and I’m so glad I finally got to it one way or another!

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