Battle Chess (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Data East's 1990 chess game for the NES, Battle Chess.

When Interplay put out Battle Chess for the Amiga in 1988, the game immediately came to be regarded as a fancy showcase for the computer's advanced graphics and sound capabilities - a new defender of the [multimedia] crown, if you will.

The concept is simple: it's chess injected with a healthy dose of gratuitous violence in order to maximize its appeal and sales. When a piece is captured, an animated depiction of its fate plays out in a cutscene. Bishops stab rooks with their cross-topped staves and rooks turn into stone giants that pound one another into rumble. The queen fires off magic spells while the king pulls a pistol from the folds of his robe to clear a path. This window-dressing has no impact on the underlying chess game - the rules are all standard - but it is fun to watch blood spray and limbs fly.

Following seven months behind the 8-bit port of The Chessmaster (   • The Chessmaster (NES) Playthrough  ) a conversion of Battle Chess by Beam served as the second of two NES chess games to be released in North America.

The NES version of Battle Chess reminds me a lot of Defender of the Crown (   • Defender of the Crown (NES) Playthrough  ). The game is a fair facsimile of the original Amiga game, but the presentation takes a huge hit in the move to the weaker hardware - enough that it feel like it misses the point of the original game.

That's not to say Battle Chess on the NES is bad. I actually played this one a fair amount way back, and the game is solid fun so long as you aren't expecting more than a basic chess sim with a few flourishes.

It's just unfortunate that the cutscenes have been censored, the graphics are hideous, the animations are painfully slow, the blue/red color scheme seems determined to blind you, and playing on anything above the lowest difficulty level forces you to spend more time waiting for the CPU player to "think" than you will actually playing the game. The NES hardware simply lacks the means to do justice to the original game.

But, if you were a kid that loved the NES and wanted to learn chess through the maiming of little pixelated people, Battle Chess got the job done.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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