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"Bishop b2 to knight e5 *SLICE*"

I am sure that few games pull it off as successfully as Battle Chess (Interplay, 1992). Pull what off, I ask as though you were asking the question? I'm glad I asked it for you!

You see it often when you play a game you somewhat like, but your subjective scales are tipping to and fro. The spark of ingenuity is there, but none of the elements necessary to fan the flame are present. There is something that could make it original, and in fact that element is more or less manifested in some respect. But it is sitting there doing nothing. Battle Chess is different. Its original aspect is the transformation of the many pieces representing the many castes of nobility into their actual physical forms. This is good; we can work with this. As such, they move according to their respective statures. The pawn clangs around in bulky armor, knowing in his mind that he and his seven compadres are not exactly meant for strategic greatness. The king's ability to move only one space at a time is exemplified by his gray hair, hunched old man back, and sluggish walking speed. And who can possibly resist the sultry queen, the mightiest piece on the entire board, whose reach spans all 64 squares and strikes fear and pandemonium into even the great rooks and bishops?

If from the title you are not able to determine the point of Battle Chess, then it is clearly not the game for you. The 32 pieces are arranged on a marble chessboard in their standard positions. With staves and swords primed, they're all ready to get down and dirty. From the king's pawn opening to castling to checkmate, every move in Battle Chess is a precarious one. In the first moves that ultimately shape the way the rest of the game will turn out, not much happens. To all outward appearances, the pieces walk around and don't do very much. It's just animated chess. Not a whole lot to get excited about.

More than likely, the first capture of the game will involve two pawns. They get into their battle stances and start fighting. What follows is a vicious battle scene, in which the person who made the move emerges victorious after the gruesome melee. No blood is shed between two pawns, but wait. It gets better.

As the game continues, the opportunity to move more pieces becomes apparent. The bishop scoots imperiously across the board with his staff in both hands, the power of which remains hidden until you make the capture that could decide the course of the whole game. Knights command the strictest attention, pushing pieces of all ranks out of the way as they walk in their L-shaped formation to the next square. Nothing, however, can prepare you for the awe-inspiring movement of the rook. Sitting still in his traditional tower shape until the moment of his summoning, he proceeds to morph into a hulking stone beast who clambers slowly and loudly across the marble battlefield. Glowing yellow beads for eyes send chills through your deepest innards when they fire straight at you, standing out like stars against the usually dark and macabre background. Every piece has a move up its sleeve. If you can corner enough pieces to make the enemy back down, you just might get to see them all along the way.

It does not suffice for these characters to flick the targets of their capture away from the board like a disruptive insect or other small trifle. Think back for a moment to the wars of medieval times and how awfully bloody they were; how no mercy was spared to the poor fool unfortunate enough to meet with the business end of a Claymore. Think of the Crusades and the oceans of blood that were spilled - all for one country's misguided religious agenda. If you took all the crimson nectar of life shed in these centuries of unrest and transfer it to a computer game, you have Battle Chess in a nutshell. Many of the captures display egregious amounts of overkill, but when you think about how tumultuous - and no different - the Dark Ages were, would you really have it any other way?

Take the memorable example of two knights squaring off against each other. The obligatory swashbuckling commences, and the defense and offense both exhibit equally impressive skills - until the guy on the wrong side (you'll know who it is) loses his sword arm. Cowering under the might of the winning knight's two arms, he hides under a shield but at the same time remains defenseless. With no upper extremities left to keep himself in the game, the losing knight has no choice but to let the victor remove his legs as well, and he soon becomes little more than a torso with four bloody stumps who stares into space and stops for a moment to ponder his fate before fading into eternal oblivion.

As you take out other pieces, you see the abilities of each one unfold slowly. The bishop is an ace in both physical and supernatural combat; the queen has apparently been studying the dark arts in her spare time; and even the king knows how to play dirty from time to time, keeping a revolver and a dagger, among other things, in that flowing silk robe of his.

Battle Chess certainly knows how to put up a fight. It will ease you in slowly on the lower difficulties without simultaneously treating you like a baby, and the manual will teach you the basics of chess notation (e.g. e3-f3) and clever tricks like castling and en passant, as well as giving you the move listings of some of the most famous chess matches ever - listings which conspicuously double as copy-protection. You must input a particular move from one of the matches listed to get into the game, or else you're booted back to DOS after three incorrect tries. Difficulty can be set through a menu by a numerical ranking that also provides the average amount of time it takes to make a move. 0 is the easiest on the list; the computer often takes very little time to consider moves and even occasionally overlooks future moves that result in a subsequent speedy downfall, but neither is it of the base mentality to fall for something so obvious as a Fool's Mate. At the other end of the spectrum is 9, in which you can likely complete a 9-to-5 shift at your day job and come home to find that the computer is still considering its opening move. What it is most likely doing, I have determined, is contemplating the possible permutations of any chess game that anyone anywhere in any era of time might possibly have played at some point in their lives and is deciding on which one it wants to use. When you read in the manual that there are several hundred octillion different chess games that can be played, you're usually floored so hard as to take the difficulty back down to one of the lower numbers if only to hurry the thoughtful (an understatement, I know) CPU along with the game.

Battle Chess is a grand-looking game, but has a tendency to drag or slow down from time to time, especially when slower pieces like the king and the rook are moving. Each character is exquisitely detailed, and the number of animations given to them is startling when taking the age of the game into account. No one makes the same two movements twice when fighting different pieces. The animation and graphics have the sublime power to make a player laugh, push vomit to the tip of their throat, and cause to them to scream, ''Oh my goodness! Did he really do that?!?!?'' Other small tidbits will help someone who is starting out on chess or is somewhat disinterested in the slight morbidity of the game. After clicking on the piece that you want to move, you must then click the square you want to move it to. A blinking yellow box will indicate that the move is legal; if nothing appears where your cursor lies, it's an ambiguous or illegal move. A two-dimensional version of normal chess is also provided for the sensitive ones who can't take the gruesomeness of the default 3D game. In it, the captor merely overlaps its victim without any fuss or muss. The occasion is indeed rare when you can truly say that a game's graphics aim to please, shock, disgust, and guide the player all at once, and Battle Chess succeeds beyond one's wildest expectations in this regard.

You certainly won't get bored with Battle Chess any time shortly after witnessing the magnitude of it. It appeals to everybody, even with the gushing gallons of blood shed throughout the months of play you'll get out of it. Action adventure games and RPGs change as the passage of time and the advancement of technology dictate, but chess will always stay roughly the same. It has been the same game for almost two millennia, and it was only about a decade ago that deep red death breathed the blossom of life into it in the form of Battle Chess. Best of all, you can't flip over the chessboard in blind anger when the computer defeats you. Depending on the way the king meets the grave, you may even laugh it off. If there's something funnier and yet more spine-chilling than a bishop slicing the king into thirds across a small row of squares with his staff, I've yet to lay eyes upon it.

Unless a pawn gouges them out first.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/03, Updated 03/11/03