World Championship Poker featuring Howard Lederer: All In

The first time I ever played poker was in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I was about 14 years old. My parents weren’t home. I had no idea how to play cards, but I had to learn, and learn quickly, because my opponent was a natural. She’d been on the scene for a couple of years at that point, and she’d played against thousands of wide-eyed kids like me. They were easy marks, and I was no different. She was beautiful, she was reclining across the screen of my computer’s monitor, and all I wanted was for her to take her low-resolution clothes off.

I don’t know how many adults (for whom it was allegedly designed) actually purchased it, but within the teenaged, male computer underground of the mid-1980s, having a pirated copy of Strip Poker for the Commodore 64 conferred nerd status. Poker with actual cards was something only mobsters and smelly old men played.

What a difference a generation makes. Crave Entertainment’s World Championship Poker featuring Howard Lederer: All In exists in a very different world for both poker and video games. Not only is competitive poker on prime time television, which is weird enough, it also has its own firmament of superstar performers. Like the athletes who preceded them, they lend their voices and likenesses to games which mimic a poker telecast’s announcers, commentators and showdown atmosphere. Does all this repackaging of a card game result in something that console owners will want to buy? For my $20, the answer is a resounding negative. Ardent fans of television poker may feel differently. The rest of us would be better off buying a deck of Bicycles, ordering a pizza and inviting over some friends.

In an ideal review, this might be the paragraph where I would throw the game a bone by citing its potential use as a training tool for poker neophytes who want to practice playing in private, without the pressure of real games against real people. Unfortunately, I can’t even go that far. Even with my very modest poker mojo, it didn’t take me long to figure out how the game’s betting pattern related to the strength of the animated players’ hands. Despite the constant stream of clichéd smack-talking (“There goes the rent money!”) from my synthetic adversaries, I was routinely wining games in “Quickplay” less than an hour after pulling off the shrinkwrap. Someone who’d never played a hand of poker in his life would only take a little while longer to reach the same point.

I had almost as much fun in the character generator as I did playing the game. “Polly,” my first avatar, was a “heavy” (according to the “body type” selector) female, very loosely modeled on my “Strip Poker” sweetheart of ages past. With an auburn bob, mirrored sunglasses, camouflage pants, and a sassy hat, I took her into a fleabag casino to open her professional career in a low-stakes tournament. If successful, she could move on to higher stakes tourneys in more glamorous locations. The game even offered me a choice of different personae for my avatar. Among my options were “housewife,” “college girl,” and “beach queen.” I chose “bashful,” which had the least obnoxious sample dialogue.

As anyone who has played a female avatar in World of Warcraft knows, the social dynamics of multiplayer gaming are heavily influenced by perceived sexual identity, often in unseemly ways. The creators of World Championship Poker have elected to simulate this phenomenon in the single-player experience. The appearance of a woman at the poker table prompted a decidedly different array of table chatter from the computer players, like the guy who told my female avatar in a Latino baritone, “I love it when you stick your chips in.” Whoa there, amigo. At least buy me a drink, first.

Online mutiplayer mode, the game’s only option for playing a fellow human, should offer players more competitive opponents, if not necessarily more polite ones. PlayStation 2 owners can use their optional “Eye Toy” camera in multiplayer mode, so in the awfully unlikely event that they can find a virtual table full of Eye Toy owners, they’ll be able to assess their poker faces for themselves. Failing that, World Championship Poker is a hastily assembled product which transparently attempts to capitalize on poker’s current pop culture favor. It offers little to set itself apart from any number of commercial poker web sites, and if playing poker on a screen is what you really want to do, you’d be better off spending your time and money on one of those instead.