Author: Michael Cummings
Date: 15:52:04 11/15/00
Well I did not buy it, but a friend did, so I spent a bit of time playing around with it. It is pretty nice to look at, but there are some things that are just plain too flashy and annoys me, but I will accept it. The installation seemed pretty strait forward this time on his system, nothing seems to go wrong like last time. He does have a PIII 800 and some of the loading times for a few things took a while. Like opening the database was pretty slow. Also opening the program seemed to take a very long time. About 30 seconds, which to me is unacceptable, even though it is reading just about everything off the hard drive, since everything else on his system runs like lightning, I again say it is not good. When I selected a personality, half way through a 5 minute game the program just froze, did not crash the system, but I still had to close that prograzm down, only to load it up again and freeze when starting a new game, the only thing to fix this was a reboot, and I did not play another game to see if it happened again. I was first excited, then the joy lessened with the crashes. But I am really only worried about the engine, and if I can play that then all the bells and whistles I can do without. Which makes me now want to push for the king engine to be avaiable to put into other programs, where as in the past I would have stuck by chessmaster. So my verdict for my first impressions, is that I think it is allright for the masses, as long as the king engine can smash other programs then I will continue to support it, even though I find it very buggy still (but whats new) The interface I can live with and there are improvements which I like. I will not blow the horn for this program yet, but it does have potential, I will look into it more and wait to see if there are any problems before I dish out some money for it. Maybe wait for a patch (if there ever will be one) I give the program 6/10 (but it is rising the further I look into it)
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