Recently our middle son, Sean, age 13, has become enamored with chess. I’m all for encouraging that because chess is a really good thinking game and I have even followed some of Garry Kasparov’s matches against computers with fascination. Sean even beat me the first time we played because I way underestimated his skill and made some silly moves! I checkmated him our second game and we haven’t played a third faceoff challenge yet. Anyway, I turned him onto the old Super NES Chessmaster video game and he played that game a little bit. But that game is weak by today’s graphical standards.

The other day while at Best Buy my wife and I noticed Chessmaster for XBox Live (only $19.95 too, woohoo!) so we bought that right away and I brought it home and showed Sean. I suggested to him to go through all the tutorials and practice against the computer and when he was ready to go to XBox online and take on some human opponents. Unfortunately he is reporting to me that there’s not a lot of chessplaying human opponents online (he keeps checking, but optimatch and create a match don’t seem to have other players online most of the time). A quick Google search turned up a couple other players who have noticed the same thing. Anyway, I thought I’d write a quick entry and put out the call to other XBox Live chess players. Scoble, does your son play XBox Live chess by chance?

Any fellow XBox Live chess players here? Please add our XBox gamer tag to your friend’s list: TJSNK. We share this account as a family, so you may want to ask which one of us it is (me, Jowl, Sean, Neal or K). Sean is the one who is on XBox Live the most, so it probably is him that you’ll see (Halo 2 or Mortal Kombat Deception, most likely, but he’s definitely up for Chess too). I like to play the Bicycle Casino craps game online. I sort of feel with this blog entry like Joshua talking to Matthew Broderick in the classic movie War Games:

Would you like to play a game, Professor Falkin?

As an aside, I must give major props to Microsoft and the game companies for their support of the XBox Live. They have added an impressive assortment of games over the last year or so. It’s an excellent deal for 50 bones a year. In the beginning XBox Live was sparse on good games, but it has become a great bargain, even for non-hardcore gamers. Our collection shows that a little more than 40% of the games we’ve purchased have XBox live support which is very cool. Content-wise XBox Live has got the other online console gaming systems easily beat. Sony, Sony Doo, where are you?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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