Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Chess Wars

Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Chess Wars is exactly what the title threatens: ordinary chess dressed in a blockbuster licence. Capstone Software published it for DOS in 1993, at a time when the company was stapling famous names onto nearly every genre available, and this time the treatment fell on the oldest strategy game of all.

The armies are the point. White is the human resistance: the T-800 stands as king, Sarah Connor as queen, two John Connors serve as bishops, Miles Dyson is doubled into the knights, and soldiers in green fatigues fill out the rooks and pawns. Black is Skynet — an army of chrome endoskeletons. Oddly enough, the T-1000, the actual villain of the film, never shows up at all.

Captures do not simply remove a piece. In the Battle Chess tradition, the game cuts away to an animated skirmish staged in the rubble of the future war, and the outcome of the exchange is acted out on screen. It is amusing the first dozen times and mostly a delay after that. Beyond the theatre you get several play modes and difficulty levels, and in an oddly earnest touch the program grades your performance against the United States Chess Federation rating scale.

The honest verdict: underneath the costume sits a workmanlike early-nineties chess program. It is perfectly fine for a casual game, but nobody serious about chess would choose it over a dedicated engine of its day, and the licence changes nothing about the decisions you make on the board. Chess Wars is a period artifact — a document of an era when a movie logo was expected to sell anything, even chess.

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