How is having a lot of secrets 'bad level design'? ... What?

3:02 I mean, a ton of people made Christmas versions of their games in the DOS era. There's Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare, XMas Lemmings... it was an entire thing. Also "Xmas Edition" of Happyland Adventures is a misnomer, it's actually a full blown sequel with a bunch of new mechanics (password system, sliding) and more levels than the original.

I'm surprirsed you say you don't have much to say about level mechanics, while the game has some really cool and innovative gimmicks - like in penultimate level of first episode where you're being stalked by an invisible robot and you have to hide in shadows for him to lose track of you, or when you're in the bombed out Earth city in second episode and you learn why the city is destroyed - because a hovecraft flies above the whole level and blasts it with plasma, forcing you to take cover in ruined buildings.

If you want a Daniel Remar game with a really good story, try Iji. It's an action RPG platformer and it is amazing. I think this one was a bit hamstrung by the structure of 'text dump at end of episode' while Iji has full text logs you can read, and benefits from it greatly.

I finally found this game. I can’t believe it

I remember this game growing up. My grandma used that old computer until about 12 years ago until she passed. She lives with us in the last few years. We kept this computer from like 1993 that my dad was coaxed into buying to keep up with the times at the time. He was still learning the joys of Microsoft Windows 3.1 (I think) before he passed when I was a really tiny man. I had a blast with that computer and played Doom (and quit because it was too scary), Wolfenstein, the cat and mouse game with the cheese up until about 2006. I remember being enamored with the “Icon Hear It” application and exploring the animations and sounds. I had such a blast with battle chess. It was the animation when you overtook a space that I couldn’t get enough of as a little dude.

game real,theobjecytions

tyvm for covering the "secret areas" of the maps. used to fw those sheep-killing so bad back in the days LMAO

On first level play up to when you get missiles. Then end the mission and sell missiles. Repeat this until you can buy something better.

I remember Oblivion even had some mod to make it work with unsupported systems. I also couldn't play Mass Effect because the GPU was missing some small bit, kind of sad.

no idea if you'll see this, but i managed to get corncob deluxe off of ebay. it was $20 for the floppy disk and the sleeve it comes in (the same one you showed in the vid actually)

jeez that's the funniest game we played in the kids gatherings in my childhood...

I know you get notifications for comments on videos, so I'm posting this here. A day early, but I do what I can. I wish you a merry christmas, Kris and hope you're having a good time! Unless, of course, you don't want that and rather side with "bah, humbug" while watching Dickens' Christmas Carol ... but the version with Bill Murray. : - )

Katakis Level 3 has a great music tune!

As a kid I loved the Vikings table, mostly because of the music. Still have it in my head once in a while.

This is the game that made me want a PC.

As a long time SC fan and enthusiast, thank you for doing this... I'd say (from my own experience), the ''problem'' with collecting data points is that there's a HUGE difference between an AI controlled enemy and a human controlled opponent. AI has the advantage of optimising movement, rate of fire, and battery regeneration... but it also has a critical flaw of pattern response so that once you find ''the weakness'' built into the design of the ship, it's just wash, rince, repeat towards a very mundane victory.... For example I decided to replay yet another campaign of SC2 (to try some minor differences in events and order of tasks completed), and even still I'm struggling beating the AI in several instances because the AI controlled enemy is optimized. In similar human to human matchups I don't struggle anywhere as much even against veteran players because they can't move, attack & regenerate optimally.

I'm particularly puzzled that, when entities were renamed, StarBases didn't change. It isn't a settlement on a planet that gives you supplies. It's a Mongol supply station. Settlements are another thing. If a planet requests evacuation, the scanners will show a settlement on the planet, from which you will pick up the settlers. Or if you're too late, a destroyed settlement. I'm not sure what happens if you land on a planet with a settlement when it hasn't sent an evacuation request.

This is one of those games where I wonder if it runs better on something like DOSBox-Staging. Might be an interesting idea for a followup. "Games that were tough to run on regular DOSBox"

Whoa, nice research! This was like my first high seas game. Surprisingly coherent but no TIE fighter

I had this as a kid and loved it. I remember trying to get a newer version of this working but my computer wouldn't run it as it required a bizarre memory configuration.

I imagine many people come here looking for information to make weapon-switch macros. Do you know how many frames it takes to switch from one weapon to another? Is there a theoretical optimum?

Hey man, if you could ever make a good tutorial on how to add custom assets like textures and sprites to the Build engine, that would be so friggin helpful. There really isn't a ton of easily digestible info on this subject on the internet in my opinion.

If they gave you a game disk in game why don't they give you an 80s portable computer to play it on? Edit: Also who are we assaulting? Or are we bringing supplies to mountain outposts to aid them in repelling someone's final assault?

Try casteling checkmate or en-passant/en-passant checkmate :) I wonder how it will handle it.

The one I had was Battle Chess 3000 with the sci-fi theme.

Archon and Archon: Adept blew these away by a landslide. 💪😎✌️ That was when EA was simply 3-6 people, and the logo was still the square, circle, and triangle.

Happy holidays Kris, have a good time. Ah yes Battle Chess, one of the games we got with our first PC. Played around much with it, although the animations most of the time got us to play a rather capturing heavy "strategy".

2:42 The ZX Spectrum also shows a border, and it's not supposed to be possible to “draw” there. It's used to indicate the tape is being loaded.

This was one of my childhood games on my Commodore Amiga 500. Fun fact, the Amiga CDTV version of this game has a tutorial sequence where all the pieces have voice acting and they introduce themselves and explain how they can move. Another fun fact is the Amiga and Atari ST versions are so alike that if you connect a null modem cable between an Amiga and an Atari ST you can have multiplayer battlechess cross platform. If you set each machine to be computer controlled instead of human controlled you can sit back and watch a match between the Amiga vs the Atari

Okay, now, that "pawn takes king" animation was cute! XD Ah, this is such a nostalgic game for me! I'm really glad to see it covered here--and just to get to see the old animations and screens again! ^_^ Fun fact: much later there would be another "chess with animated pieces battling it out" game, simply called " _Combat Chess_ ". It didn't have the charm of _Battle Chess_ --for me, at least--but it did have some cool points. For example, the "pawns" were wyvern-like creatures, referred to as "Preternatural Agamiddian Winged Neoraptors". ^_^ As to the outro, many thanks for bringing us on this lovely ride through DOS gaming! And I hope that 2025 treats you well! ^_^

The graphics in this game are wonderful, I love the details in the animation of the character

There is also a Star Wars themed Battle Chess game. The animations are entertaining for a while, then they get repetitious, and I switch to the 2d mode. I made a DOS shareware strategy game long ago that was a pun on this title, but it had nothing to do with chess.

Thanks for going deeper about the different versions. I remembered mine as having more color than CGA, but less than regular VGA. Possibly what I had was the strange VGA "16-colour" version you mentioned, since I don't remember having a choice of graphics.

3:04 The closeup and the sound effect I'm dying 😂

7:57 was expecting another minute long giggle fit

Thanks for the tip on the cycles setting. It was unusually sloppy of GOG to mess up such an simple setting in their optimization process.

Oh I remember this game well, though EGA and without sounds. Best chess game of the era. As a kid I always hoped for the pieces to defend themselves sometimes.

The holidays don’t start till Kris takes his break. Happy holidays and see you next year!

Me and my friend used to go to the library just to play this on their computers

I had this on the old Amiga 1000 and I regretted getting it. Once you saw all the animations once, it was just a rather slow chess game. I also had Chessmaster and (while not as immediately appealing) it was a lot better for actually playing chess.

I think I am used to the PC speaker sounds used instead of the normal sound

If I were to buy this game, I would probably get the Steam version just to access the enhanced editions and then copy the files over to run in DOSBOX. Does anyone know if the Steam version has the disc images and directories to allow me to do that? Because a number of DOS games I've bought on Steam usually provide that option.

Chess: the movie, idea good, but playability just slogs it dooooown, animations fun for a few games but then its becomes unplayable if you actually want to play chess. But the 2d view helps, its a legit chess game for its time.

I'd say this was more for casual chess players. Serious players would probably find it too slow and gimmicky once the novelty of the animations had worn off.

The Enhanced CD-Rom (I believe) had a fantastically amusing tutorial that I think was hosted by the rook. The version I got came with the CD-ROM drive (using a caddy) and a bunch of other disks including 7th Guest

I remember seeing this game at a friend's place somewhere around 1990 on a 80286 with a VGA graphics card. For that time it was beautiful. Although being 10 years old around that time we didn't have the patience to play this game together, I really don't remember us playing it that much. But again, for that time the sound, animations and graphics were on the high end compared to other games.

The animations are so slow, Nakamura's head would explode in bullet chess..

Just last week I wittnessed mate with pawn, in Eric Rosen's chess channel. Rare, yes, but there is so many games going on, it will happen frequently. Just like quads in poker.

The board would be easier to read if the knight looked like a horse.