I love playing poker. It’s a pastime that ticks all the boxes for a worthwhile time spent. Social interaction, concentration, mental agility, deportment. Get into a game at your local Texas Hold’em club, enter a casino tournament or just the weekly game with your poker buddies and a pizza. Whatever the stakes, there’s nothing like beating your opponent’s gut-shot straight with a full house, holding the nuts while everyone around you is drawing dead, or representing a big hand when you are holding a 3/2 offsuit.
If you understood what I was on about in that previous paragraph, chances are you would be aware of the World Poker Tour, or even an avid follower. For those of you who are a wee bit bamboozled, then this game on the PS2 will probably excite you less than Eastenders reruns on UK Gold.
So, why would you want to play World Poker Tour (WPT) instead of visiting one of the numerous online poker houses? why would you want to pay £32.99 (or the discount price of £14.99 that you can find online) for this game? Well… You probably wouldn’t. Unless you are particularly interested in seeing the names and likenesses of your WPT heroes on-screen.
See, the thing is with computer AI is that by its very nature, it has to be governed by a series of rules otherwise it just won’t work. Human nature, especially under pressure such as when playing poker, is the antithesis of order. People are extremely unpredictable and that’s half the fun, you don’t know whether your opponent has a better hand than you, or whether they are bluffing or believe they have the best hand. Sure, you can work out the odds according to the cards in your hand and on the table, and work out your ‘pot odds’ according to how much you have committed already and whether it is worth following through if you have committed. Computer AI just doesn’t give you that. Sure, they can work out the odds of a particular card or hand coming up and then make an appropriate decision based on that, and irrational decisions can be programmed in randomly, but currently, there is no game of poker, including WPT, that can simulate a human response to the game. I have to say though, WPT does throw an interesting effort on to the table, but it still doesn’t come close.
The opponents in the game can largely be depended upon to be predictable, especially at the ‘amateur’ level, which is completely the opposite of my experience. For example, on this level, every single time I raised before the flop, all folded except the dealer and the big blind, no-one re-raised. Also, I was able to sail through the game by just betting big on every hand, although on higher difficulty settings it was more probable that a bluff wouldn’t work, which is as it should be, but much easier to bluff than playing with a real group of professionals (I’d imagine)!
One aspect of the game that screamed ‘gimmick’ to me was the addition of ‘tells’, where a character would show their emotions on their face. This was an interesting gameplay mechanic in theory, but in practice it didn’t really affect the way I played my hands. Likewise, gurning a caricature of ‘surprise’ on my character’s face didn’t seem to affect the other players’ betting one little bit. Also, the control of this facial contortionism wasn’t too intuitive, with the use of the analogue stick and a different grimace on each of the points of the compass. I got my gloating face all mixed up with my surprised face. Add the fact that the game seemed to turn my analogue control off (that little red light on the dual shock kept going off and on) randomly, and default to ‘surprised’, its just as well it made no difference.
The WPT game does try hard to stand apart from the rest. A complex character creation tool allows you to customise the look of your player, albeit only physically. You can really create the most alarming-looking people and change all their physical aspects, although why you would want to do this for anything below the waist – 99% of the action takes place sitting at a table (you only stand up if you are all in) escapes me. Some replay value has been added: if you make certain hands in the game, you are given special chips that you can use to buy clothing or accessories for your character. Also, you can play as one of your favourite WPT stars – but you still have to start at the beginning of the amateur level. That’s if you can recognise them – the graphics are quite angular and the character models are all very similar.
Loading times are a big bind, I got especially frustrated that loading the main menu took as long as each individual level, and you get thrown back to the main menu after each game, thus doubling up the time. And, the dealer takes longer than my arthritic grandmother to deal the cards out, a useful feature would be the ability to skip this and start when everyone is holding their pocket hands. Luckily, there is the option to skip when you fold and start the next hand (going through that torturous deal again).
Completing the package are some nifty videos concerning the stars of WPT, footage of them in action, and some sparse and quite frankly random commentary by the WPT commentators Mike Sexton and Vince Van Pattern (no Courtney Friel, unfortunately).
So, the gameplay is reasonable, if predictable and the facial gimmicks are flawed but amusing. The load times are excruciating, the dealers are obviously missing fingers and the graphics are not exactly a million dollars. For diehard fans of the WPT only. All others, get a cheap game for your mobile phone, play it online for free, or just get a few buddies together, a couple of beers and baize tablecloth, and spend the money on a nice set of poker chips in an aluminium case.
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