I know i promised to write only positive things but really : Another Interplay sale ?

And didn't we have Sunless Sea and the Sherlock Holmes games on sale a few weeks ago with better discounts ?

Oh hey, thanks!

Oh... wait...

mafia 3 is an awesome game. can't believe people don't like this. mafia 2 isn't my cup of tea. but glitches aside (play on gamepad) the game is really good. just need the devs to fix occasional crashing, keyboard instability and support profiles instead of just one and it's flawless. crazy game. just plain crazy

+1

With a few exceptions, the really good chess games mostly aren't on Gog nor Steam, so that sort of critical observation isn't unique to one particular game, it applies to most chess games on general game sites.

The best chess program in the world not long ago was "Stockfish", which is GPL licensed, so you can get it free if you look around serious chess web sites.

The best varies year to year and I haven't been keeping track, but competition computer chess sites is where to look for info about basically all of the top 10 to 20 chess games, some of which are free and some for sale commercially.

Off the top of my head, another very serious chess program available on general game sites is "Fritz Chess".

I have a note that "Simply Chess" on steam (and on gog too? not sure) uses Stockfish as its engine, so that would be one of the few exceptions.

However, the best chess programs are *too* good for most players who don't do serious competition, so there's something to be said for the various not-very-good chess programs, where it may be possible for a fairly average player to win sometimes (usually still requiring careful attention to tactics however).

And there are pure eye candy chess games that appeal to some, like the classic Battle Chess or the more recent Check vs Mate. And various chess-variant and chess-puzzle games.

Commentary on that GPL-licensed Stockfish some years back (again, I haven't been keeping up on these topics):

"After being listed in the top 3 of computer chess ranking lists for quite some time, Stockfish has now won the season 6 superfinals of the prestigious Thoresen Chess Engines Competition over Komodo with 13 wins, 45 draws and 6 losses."

http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/26vrj8/gpllicensed_stockfish_is_now_the_strongest_chess/

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/26rsa1/stockfish_wins_tcec/

http://stockfishchess.org

And more generally:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Computer_Chess_Championship

tl;dr: unless you play tournament chess, you may not *want* one of the better chess programs.

In a good adaption of chess you can set the difficulty level.

Indeed, they were on sale at higher discounts not even two weeks ago, during the Trick-or-Treat sale.

You're quite right. However, it's also true that many good competition chess programs (well, also many bad and non-competition programs) don't offer that, and of the ones that do, my limited experience is that their settings are still aimed at tournament players. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.

Anyway, if you know of a recommendation for a good chess program where you can set difficulty and that is aimed at non-competition average players, that would be interesting. (Tournament players generally know where to look for what they want.)

Don't let the cartoonish graphics and the fact that it's a gentle rip on the cheesiness of The Power Rangers types of shows fool you. Chroma Squad is big goofy fun.

Crime against nature

He is nature.

Nobody knows. That is why you need one of the worlds greatest detectives to find out. ;)