Someone mentioned this game in the "Top games that haven't been done" thread, and I decided to take a look at it. There's not much to say about the game itself, since chess has well-defined rules. As far as a TAS is concerned, here are some factors that need to be taken into consideration:
Difficulty: While there's a rule that the games should be played at the hardest difficulty, I believe that following it for this specific game would result in probably the most boring movie of it. The computer can take several minutes to make one move on the highest difficulty. From having it play against itself for a while, probably around an hour, I think that the amount of time it takes to decide upon a move gets longer as the situation gets more complicated. I'm not sure about that, though.
My opinion is that a TAS of this game should attempt to defeat the computer in as few moves as possible at a difficulty for which a watcher would not need to wait an unbearable amount of time for the computer to make its moves.
Animations: The player has the choice to play on a 2-D or a 3-D board. The 2-D board has a standard representation of the chess pieces, while the 3-D board has figures that actually walk to each spot and fight each other during captures. The animation of each fight depends on what kind of pieces are interacting. This, of course, takes more time. However, I think it will add entertainment value to the game, especially for watchers who aren't avid chess players. Since a TAS would be going for the fewest number of moves to checkmate, the fights would hopefully not get boring, since there probably wouldn't be many of them in the first place and not many between the same pieces.
With these ideas in mind, I recorded a movie against the lowest level of the computer, playing on the 3-D board. I defeated it in 11 moves, but I'm sure that can be improved. Unfortunately, my file host is adding servers or something, so I can't upload any files atm. I'll just write out the moves for now:
- e3 e5
- Qh5 Nc6
- Bc4 d5
- Bb5 Bd6
- Nh3 Ng8-e7
- Ng5 g6
- Qh6 a6
- Qg7 Rg8
- Qf7x+ Kd7
- Nh7x b5x
- Nf6++
That movie takes 5:38, but my button presses weren't frame optimized and I didn't stop recording as soon as I could have.