Legend has it that the guy who invented chess did so as a favour for his king. When given the game, the king was so pleased that he offered its creator anything he wanted. Being a modest man, he asked for, "One grain of corn placed on the first square on the board. Put double this amount (two grains) in the second square, double that (four grains) in the third, and so on until you reach the 64th and final square." The king was astonished that he'd asked for so little, and readily agreed.

Little did he realise that doubling up 63 times produces an astronomical total (18,446,744,073,709,551,615): there wasn't that much corn in the entire world!

This tale might be apocryphal of course [Just get on with it - Ed], and even if it isn't, it won't work with your pocket money. Not that it'd need to - Grandmaster Chess might be showing its age a bit, but if you can put up with its idiosyncrasies it's a bargain at £1.99, especially with Renaissance Othello thrown in for good measure!

Grandmaster Chess offers nine levels of play and a special level for board analysis or postal chess but, like most chess sums of its day (it was first released in 1982!), the higher levels take for ever to make a move - Level Nine takes up to two hours! A full game at this level would probably take three days so it's highly unlikely anyone will bother, but the first four levels take a minute or less and even at Level Seven it only takes five - overall, this isn't a slow program.

Where the product really shows its age is in the user interface - it's terrible! Instead of the now-common joystick-and-cursor approach, Grandmaster has you entering your moves using standard notation. Each square on the chessboard has its own code consisting of a letter and number - to move a piece, first enter the reference for the square it's on, then for the square you want to move It to, so to move the white long's pawn forward two squares you'd enter E2E4. Cumbersome, but it works. There's no pointless, memory-hungry options to change the perspective or style of pieces, but you can alter the colours.

Overall Grandmaster Chess isn't a bad program. By today's standards the user interface is shocking, but the number of options and level artificial intelligence is pretty impressive. And Renaissance Othello? Well that's just more of the same - a competent but unspectacular version of the board game. Its user interface is even worse than Grandmaster's, but it's a welcome 'B' side freebie.