National Lampoon’s Chess Maniac 5 Billion and 1 was released in 1993 as a humorous addition to the animated chess genre. Best known in the genre is Battle Chess and although in some regards these two titles are extremely similar, they also differ greatly.
You can change your board position, so that you have the most comfortable view. Choose from a small number of boards and backgrounds, and of course you can set up the board however you want too. You can also select the intelligence/play level of the computer.
In many ways, this game competes with the chess master 3000 (Released in 1991). While Chess Master 3000 offers more chess sets, none of them are animated.
Like Battle Chess, you have only one animated set to play with. Chess Maniac incorporates the highly used technique of taking live video and imposing it into the computer animated back ground. Unlike a lot of games that uses this technique, Chess Maniac gets away with it.
As with Battle Chess, when you move a piece it actually walks across the board, and when you attack a piece (or your piece is attacked) there is a small cut scene that shows a humorous battle scene, in which case the attacked piece falls. Some cut scenes seem rather long, and some are rather short. Unfortunately,
some cut scenes make absolutely no sense.
The most enjoyable part of this particular chess program, are the distractions the Chess Maniac uses on you. While in other chess games, there’s nothing to grab your attention, here there is. You can witness an insane military officer throw grenades at you, an Airplane-Pilot drop bombs on you, and many other odd and chuckle inducing distractions. You must also be prepared to stop the Chess Maniac from cheating, he does this in several ways. One of which is by ever so obviously removing a piece from the board very slowly while whistling.
The greatest draw back to this game is that eventually it does get old and after a few games it starts to lose its charm. HOWEVER, it is worth playing at least once or twice. Graphics are up to date, for the time, and have a certain polish other games from 1993 don’t have. Sound is realistic, yet can include some static. Over all I would give it 3 ½ out of 5 stars. 1 star for graphics, ½ a star for sound, 1 star for entertainment value, and 1 star for the actual chess engine, while losing one star for re-playability.
In closing, if you want an enjoyable chess experience that takes the edge off, while delivering humorous settings and situations, good graphics, decent battle cut scenes, and some good laughs, this is a game for you! This game has some adult themes, not suitable for children.
