Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Shotest Shogi Now Available on XBLA

I checked as soon as I woke up, and thankfully it's here. I didn't have too much time, so I completed the Beginner Tutorial to get it out of the way. As it turns out, the Beginner tutorial ends with a full match that is nicely annotated. It's not quite as detailed as the games in "Logical Chess: Move by Move" by Chernev, but it's well done and I definitely plan on reviewing it again. It *may* be a bit too difficult for a true beginner, but I could be wrong.

As with the PC version, the graphics are outstanding and the pieces (which default to Western style) are nicely detailed. The environments (inside and outside) add to the feel of the game and the music, to my taste, is somehow more appropriate and pleasing than the PC version's (which I've turned off). The controls obviously will not be as easy and intuitive as using a mouse, but they don't get in the way too much and I can't really think of a way to improve them at this point.

The only problem I noticed with the XBLA version so far is that the piece placement sound has changed from the nice substantial wood click sound to a softer chess-like felt on wood sound. I don't understand why they would have made this change and I hope a future update addresses this.

Easily worth the $10. :) I look forward to playing the game later!

Shotest Shogi on XBox Live

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info. There are no ratings for it at XBLAratings.com yet so I was wondering if it is worth $10. Now to go get some more marketplace points.

frankiii said...

Well, I wonder if xblaratings.com will do it justice. I would think this is a bit of a niche market since it's not really a video game, per se.