Mychess

The Good
The first thing that stands out in this game is it's appearance. The graphics are in hi-res, something very rare at that time. The game is in black and white but that doesn't bother - in fact, i don't think it would look as well if it was in 4 color CGA. Once you start playing you'll immediately notice another good feature of the game: it's challenging AI. Even at the lower levels of difficulty, the AI sure isn't dumb. At the higher levels... well, good luck!

The Bad
The game has no mouse support (understandable, since there were no mice when it was written) so you must type your moves in the standard chess notation. But the text parser could be a lot better, as it reads the moves on a rather rigid format. There must be exactly one (any) character between the start and end squares. For instance, "A2_A4" and "A2-A4" are valid moves but "A2__A4" and "A2A4" are not. Since you have to retype the move in case of error, this tends to get annoying. A big issue is the lack of a save/load feature. The best you can do is write down all the pieces' positions and setup the board later accordingly (something you can do at startup). Remember this is a boring thing to do, since you have to type in all those positions. Lastly, the AI, although good, can take a long time to decide what to do, even at early stages of a game.

The Bottom Line
If you like chess games, try this one. Not only for it's historical value, but to test your skills against the AI.