^Heh, if you think that's bad, you should probably avoid just about every chess title from that era and before. Battle Chess for 3DO, Video Chess for Atari 2600, USCF Chess for Intellivision, etc...all those games can take hours on a move, right from the start of the game! Oh, and the latter two have the nasty habits of (respectively) making illegal moves and crashing.
It's pretty standard for chess games to have a lame ending -- I don't think I've played one that didn't. Also, I know that Chessmaster for NES won't give you a win screen if you use undo, which I think is totally fair. Chessmaster is a much better game that any of the ones I've listed, though, and it sounds like it's better than VC64 too. It has an opening book -- a set of pre-programmed openings -- that enable it to play instantly for anywhere from the first 2-3 moves, to the first 11-12, depending on whether you follow established openings that have been analyzed in depth.
My own standard for beating chess games is to beat it on the highest timed difficulty level (i.e. not infinite) with the Black pieces, but I'm also a former tournament chessplayer (and still play online) so that probably influences my take on things. I'm slowly working my way through the chess games for most vintage consoles, and if I had VC64 I'd give it a shot, but I've never played it.
Anyway, the good news is that there are many programs now available for free that can crush even the strongest Grandmasters while using less than a minute per move!
Edited: 07/23/2013
at 12:57 AM
by bronzeshield