Written by Brian Beck, 7/11/2006
Played on:
Xbox
Poker has been around for a long time. If you watch some of the old cowboy movies, they’ll play some form of power. 5 card draw, 7 card stud or any of the other variations were popular saloon gambling games in the movies. Until recently, though, poker was something that was relegated to back rooms in casinos and house games with a few buddies.
However, in the past five or ten years, poker has taken center stage. ESPN televises the World Series of Poker and many other television channels have other smaller tournaments. Big names in the game are highly regarded as stars on the same level as sports luminaries. Maybe it is the suspense of the game that has led to the rise in the popularity. Maybe the large sums of money that can change hand in the span of seconds attracts poker fans.
Or maybe it is the ability for people to play poker at any level. When the poker craze started to sweep the US, sites sprung up all over the place that allowed you to play for free or with real money. You can play games with stakes as low as a penny or as high as hundreds of dollars per hand. Also, games started to spring up on consoles featuring the new stars of poker.
The most recent game, Stacked, stars Daniel Negreanu. Featuring a new poker AI system, the game has been delayed multiple times but finally released last month. The wait has brought an overall smart poker game to the table that, while lacking in a few areas, is still fun to play and a good way to practice offline.
When you first start the game, you’ll get a chance to create your poker player. This area was woefully under-developed. With the lack of any real animation save for a few small things, it would have been nice to see a wider variety of player looks. As it is, there seem to be a few standard looks that you can customize with hair, sunglasses, hats and clothes. Each game you play, though, will result in you seeing the same general looks with a few small changes each time. Their voices all sound exactly the same, too – I’ve taken to trying to imitate each one. My favorite is the dude with the huge gold necklace – he seems to sound and look like the stereotypical rapper. Character creation, overall, left me pretty disappointed.
However, character creation is just a small part of the console poker game experience. Thankfully, the meat of the game is mostly there. When you start, you’ll only have access to one casino and only some games. You can simply sit down at a table where some people are already playing or you can choose to play in a single or multi-table tourney. Each of these come with various different stakes and also in no-limit and limit flavors. It would have been nice to be able to actually walk around a small casino to the games, but there is only a menu.
The ‘ring game’ (a term used to represent the regular non-tournament game) is pretty simple. You sit down at the table and have however much money is in your bankroll. Then you simply start playing. Controls are simple enough to pick up on. When betting, you simply push up or down on the control pad or stick to choose if you want to fold, check or bet. You can also choose to raise the pot and, in a no limit game, increase the amount of your raise. There are options to smile or frown but these really have no noticeable effect on the game.
The interface is also lacking in some areas. For example – why can’t I at least hit a button on the controller to see how many chips all of my opponents have? While I’d really like to be able to glance around the table and look at stacks, at least being able to see how much money each of my opponents have would be nice. Instead, I can only see how much someone has when they’re playing in the hand. Also, the slide-out menu is a pain to work with. Sure, it’ll retract automatically when you go to make a bet, but why can’t I just close it by pressing a button. For that matter, why can’t I just do most of the things from the menu with buttons on the controller? I have 10 different buttons available on the XBOX, not to mention two sticks and a directional pad. Let me use them!
When your turn comes around to make a play, you can ask Daniel Negreanu for advice. Some of the time, the advice is spot-on in regards to commonly accepted poker strategy while, at times, it will make some completely off-the-wall suggestions. Some of the pro-tips lack any sort of reasoning but once in awhile, there is some reasoning in the tip. Overall, the ability to get advice won’t make nearly as big of a difference on your poker game as actually playing or reading some of the more popular books. All the advice feature will really do is offer you some very basic tips that give you a good start into the world of poker.
A nice option the game offers is the ability to speed through hands where you aren’t making any sort of plays. If you’ve folded early, pressing the A button speeds through the hand. This was nice when I just wanted to get through a game fast but isn’t always recommended – sometimes, paying attention will actually help.
Each of your opponents at the table also have their own strategies. Some of them are incredibly reckless with their money, going all in with hands that seem horrible while other players are very conservative and may go in only 5% of the time on a hand. Opponents will also pick up on your play habits, too – if you have a tendency to only play when you have a really good hand and you’re the blind, the guy that comes before you may throw out a big bet to try to put you out of the hand early. In all, the AI seems to work fairly well most of the time though you can trick it into playing certain ways (for example, going all in a lot gets opponents to go all in a lot too).
Multiplayer is pretty standard. You can go online and play in regular games with buddies or play in a tournament. Real money, of course, isn’t at stake here. Really, though, anyone buying this game for the multiplayer aspect alone is better off going online and picking up one of the many free clients available.
Overall, Stacked is a mixed bag of experience. Customizability and interface problems aside, the single player experience will be fun for those that are somewhat new to the game. The AI will learn fairly well and adapt to your play style but won’t really manage to challenge those that are well-versed in the ways of poker. Multiplayer, while done well, seems to be useless overall with the lack of any real character customizability. In the end, I did enjoy Stacked and think it is worth, at the very least, a rental. I would wait to buy it until it drops a bit more in price, though.
