Chess Buddy

It's funny, how life turns out. To play chess in school was an insurmountable social disadvantage, a frank admission of failure to integrate, and a cast-iron guarantee for anybody who seriously played it that virginity would remain an incurable condition.

Then, once you step out of the crucible of school on to the litmus paper of adult life, the ability to play chess well becomes something to brag about. People who can command a chess board, calculating and speculating while their opponents flounder in ignorance, are revered as mental beefcakes. And with good reason.

Chess is hard. There are more possible games of chess than there are stars in the known universe, and there's about as much chance of any two games turning out the same as there is of consecutive coin tosses from now until the end of time all turning out heads, and then falling down a drain.

These statistics are untrue, of course, in the strict sense (or, at the very least, the possibility of them happening to be true is very remote), but they serve to demonstrate the bewildering complexity of chess.

So it shouldn't surprise to learn Chess Buddy is hard. Very hard , in fact. There are five difficulty settings, from 'baby' to 'professional', and the default 'easy' mode is more than enough to set the greasy cogs of your mind in motion. The computer plays a brusque and brutal game, readily swapping pieces when the possibility of a suicide mission presents itself, and it moves with a decisive lack of loading pauses.

The presentation is clear and bold. There's a choice of blue, brown, and green for your board, yet no option to change the pieces or the viewing angle. The sound effects, meanwhile, are reminiscent of the bleeps emitted by an old Atari 2600, signalling moves but keeping quiet otherwise.

Provided that the pieces are visible, however, presentation is not significant. Chess Buddy's look is clean and uncluttered, which is all we need concern ourselves with.

The game the computer plays is very competent. It may not stand up to the rigours of competition with a real-life grandmaster, but for most it presents a bracing challenge.

However the game lacks some features that would have substantially increased its appeal. At the most basic level, while there are instructions for the controls, there's no training mode, set of rules, or list of legal moves. Combined with the gut-punching difficulty level, it means Chess Buddy is strictly for experienced players.

That in turn suggests that the apparatus of real life chess should be present – but it isn't. There are no scores and no way of registering your rating online. And although you can save individual games, you cannot save a profile and record your own form.

As such, the game is a slightly curious entity: advanced enough to attract chess enthusiasts, but not sufficiently equipped with features to please them. Nevertheless, Chess Buddy is a more than worthy opponent.