Chess

Chess is chess. It's not a game where the computer will play it better than you can manage yourself. It's just an interface.

In MS-DOS back in 1981, there wasn't much around, so the computer takes a chessboard, draws it with characters, and waits to see what you do. You enter your move using coordinates, the computer sits in the corner and calculates. Whatever difficulty or level you pick, everything is slow and predictable. The computer plays as if it's reading from a textbook — no intuition, no mistakes, no guesswork.

Playing without graphics, without animation, without anything beyond bare functionality. Squares on the terminal, letters and numbers on the axes, nothing more. Sound? Not even in silence. When the computer moves, you see only text. When it's your turn, you wait for input. There's no fluidity to it, no sense of play. It's a tool for playing chess — and nothing more.

Back in the nineties it was useful. Training, an opponent available whenever you wanted, the chance to play without a second player. Today it's not entertainment, it's an artifact from when computers were learning to think and people were learning that they could play a game with one. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you're bored right now on an old DOS machine or in an emulator and want to arrange matches without distraction, here it is. But it won't entertain you. It will just… occupy your time. And that's not the same thing.