Texas Hold 'Em Poker

"This will teach me to impulse buy"

Normally I do a fair amount of research before I purchase a game. RPGs I give a little more leeway to since I collect them, but for any other type of game I am pretty discerning and select what I am going to buy carefully. But when I saw Texas Hold ‘Em Poker (THOP) at Toys R Us for $10 new I decided to make an exception and buy it on the spot. Lesson learned. While it's not the worst game ever made, I don't fell like it's worth the $10 I spent on it. $5 maybe, and maybe not even that.

When you first turn on THOP everything looks great. There are two different play modes: career and quick play. In career mode you can build up money and win tournaments to make it to the final tournament in Las Vegas. In quick play you just sit down for one session of poker and nothing is carried over into future games. If you decide to start in quick play you are presented with two options: 1 table tournament or sit-down table. If you choose the sit-down mode you quickly discover the first major flaw with this game: in order to eliminate one of the other players you have to force them to make a bet for exactly whatever they have left. If they have $100 left, you bet $150, and they lose they get to remain at the table with a new starting stack of money. In order to knock that player out you would have to bet $100 exactly. That pretty much eliminates sit-down mode as a viable option, so then it's time to try 1 table tournament mode. In this mode you select up to nine opponents and how big of stakes you want at the table, anywhere from $100 to $20000. Everything looks fine until you start the betting. That's when you notice the horrible, nearly non-existent artificial “intelligence”. The opponents will call before the flop on nearly every hand no matter what they have or what has been bet. If one of the players gets dealt a good opening hand they will stay in the hand until the end regardless of what comes up. For example, if the computer has a pair of Jacks it will stay in even if four hearts end up on board. The “AI” doesn't take into account the situation, the bets that have been made, chip stacks, or anything else when betting. Sometimes opponents will call all in bets with no hand at all. You quickly realize that every game can be won by simply folding every hand until you get a monster hand and then going all in. Repeat a couple times and victory is assured.

Eventually you night get around to trying career mode, which features the same sit down and 1 table tournament options. We know to skip sit down, so let's go right to 1 table. Here you start out in a small tournament and if you win it you are given a password which lets you go on to the next tournament. Yep, a password. You'd think by now password saves would be a relic from an earlier era, but here they live on. Because we're dealing with the same horrible AI we can quickly move up through the tournament ranks only to discover that the “career mode” consists of only 5 tournaments. Once you've beaten the Las Vegas tournament the game is over. As a nice bonus there is absolutely no ending text or animation. It just says, “Congratulations! You have won the tournament with X dollars”, just like the previous four tournaments. Career mode can easily be beaten in a couple hours.

In addition to the problems with the AI and the lack of a robust career mode, THOP also suffers from a couple other fatal flaws. One of the fun problems you can encounter is the infinite check loop. When this happens the computer opponents will check over and over again, and you don't have the option of betting so you have to check too. The good news is it only happened to me once; the bad news is the only way to fix it is to turn your GBA off and then back on. Luckily you can save your game…oh, never mind. Probably the worst offense of this game is that it doesn't even evaluate the hands correctly! If two players have the same rank of hand, say a flush, it will just split the pot between the two, instead of determining which player has the better flush. I've seen the same thing happen with two pairs and a pair as well. It does seem to manage to get high card right though.

If you're desperate for a cheap GBA game that you can play in small doses this game might be worth picking up for cheap. If you're a Hold ‘Em fanatic this game can be slightly entertaining for maybe an hour or so. If you don't fall into either one of those groups I would suggest avoiding this game. With a little more attention to detail by the development team and a lot better AI this game could be fun, but as it is this game is not worth your time or mine.

Overall score: 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/30/04