Hotbabe Chess

Although this chess game costs nothing and boasts personality, it's tough to overlook its numerous problems. The first downside is Hotbabe Chess comes as a rather large 60MB download and will consume around 75MB of RAM once it's on your machine. As its name suggests, the program lets you play chess against a female who teases, taunts, and encourages you through a chatlike window under the board. You'll also see a Webcam-based movie of your opponent in the interface's lower-right window, but no matter which of the 20 difficulty levels you choose, you'll always get the same girl. She appears to be talking, but Hotbabe Chess lacks audio altogether. To boot, the graphics are rather low budget considering the program's size, and in our tests, the game hung up several times. Chess players looking for novelty value might try this one, but the majority of folks will find its negatives outweigh the positives.