The thing about this new X-box World Series of Poker game from
Activision is that it's just not that interesting a game. The best
thing about the game is the ability to customize your player, and
that's incredibly detailed, but the rest of the game isn't
particularly realistic or even interesting. And since there's no
money involved, it's kind of a "why bother?" experience.
WSOP Simulation
The game is designed to simulate the
World Series of Poker, and
to make it more realistic, they've added a fun little ESPN style
presentation to it. But it's only fun for the first few minutes, and
after that it slows things down quite a bit. Luckily, you can skip
past all that and get right into playing your hands.
One of the problems with the gameplay that I had was that the
little movies and players looking at their cards and deciding what
to do seemed to take forever, and I was just pulling the trigger to
move on to the next hand and advance in the game.
Rio Suites Simulation
I've personally not played poker at the
Rio Suites, so I'm not
sure how accurate the simulation of the poker room is. But from what
I understand, the details of the poker room look and feel are pretty
accurate. The graphics were good, and it looked like a real poker
room to me. What stood out was how artificial and unrealistic the
other players seemed.
World Series of Poker Collectors' Chips
This was my favorite part of the game, strangely enough, but I'm
a weird guy. Give me chips to collect, and I'll play almost any
video game for hours trying to collect all of them. I didn't get
past about 5 or 6 chips in this game, but I might go back and give
it another try.
The Problem with Poker Video Games
Maybe Daniel Negreanu's upcoming Stacked game can somehow
get around this problem, but I'm not sure how. The problem is this:
poker is a game about money. The chips have monetary value in a real
poker game. And since that's what the game is ABOUT, when you take
the money away, you take away the game's meaning.
When I drink beer, I want to get a buzz. When I have sex, I want
to have an orgasm. And when I play poker, I want to win money. And
guess what? I'll never win money playing this X-box World Series
of Poker game.
I'm a lot better off trying to qualify for the real World Series
of Poker at
Party Poker or something like that.
You might also be interested in some of these other articles on
this site:
Evelyn Ng (She's going to be featured in the upcoming Stacked
video game.)
This page was last updated on January 5, 2006.
