Chronogamer - Checkers (Channel F, 1979)

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Checkers (Channel F, 1979)

 

This was what the U.S. got instead of the Saba Schach game I wrote of a few days ago.

 

Checkers?

 

Don't misunderstand me, I like the game of checkers, it's what most people learn before moving on to Chess and I'm no exception. The US gets Checkers and not Chess? It just seems wrong, insulting even.

 

How does it rate as a checkers game? Not bad. The controls make enough sense that one can jump right in. My only complaint is that the AI always gets to go first and there's no option for two people to play against each other. Of course, the big plus is there IS an AI to play against! It just isn't a huge challenge and I'm not aware of any difficulty settings that can be changed.

 

It should be noted that I don't have the Checkers cart. It's pretty rare and the few times I've seen it on ebay it was in big lots with other stuff and was going for a pretty penny. A pretty penny I wasn't willing to part with, especially since it was emulated well enough for a game of Checkers.

 

With regards to sound: Thankfully, there's very little sound. What they do choose to use is really annoying. When the computer player picks a piece to move, the piece blinks and you hear a high pitched "beep beep beep". I don't know if it would be so painful coming out of the actual console, but coming out of my TV it hurt me the first time I heard it. I turned the volume way down after that.

 

Here's the screens from the MESS version.

 

 

Nothing terribly impressive to look at but not un-fun to play. If you're a kid and no one wants to play checkers with you, this isn't a bad cart to have.

 

Next entry, we go Bowling!!!

 

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