Quote Originally Posted by Edmond Dantes View Post
Chess can be really uneven. I recently played Chessmaster for the NES, and... well, I won, and I suck at Chess too. Then again I might've had it on a low difficulty.
You did for sure. Chessmaster defaults to Newcomer 1 difficulty, which basically plays the first move that comes into the CPU's head. TheMexicanRunner famously defeated Chessmaster in under a minute for his NESMania project, because the default difficulty played so abominably that it literally walked into checkmate, almost as though it was helping him.

Play on any higher difficulty, even Level 1 (60 moves/5 minutes), and Chessmaster will give you a real game, comparable to a player between USCF ratings 1400-2000 (depending on the type of position it's playing). I'm a tournament chessplayer -- not a Grandmaster or anything, but strong enough that I've beaten some masters and won money in competition -- and it definitely puts up a good fight.

As you can probably tell, I love old console chess programs. After 2000 it gets less interesting since consoles and computers sort of converge, but before that you get a whole range of programs, from the abominable to the shockingly good. The Chessmaster series is the most reliable by far, but there have been some decent releases by other companies, and the Atari 2600 and Intellivision chess programs were really quite respectable for their time.