XBLA review: Texas Hold 'Em (5/10)

Quick! Stop Microsoft from making money! Download Texas Hold 'Em for free!

No, really. It's free until Friday morning. Download it now and save your points for, um ... yeah, anyway, download it. It's pretty good.

Standard Hold 'Em: ring game or tournament, ring games are limit, no-limit, or pot-limit, with varying blinds and buy-ins. Tournaments are single-table and range from free to a six-figure buy-in. There's also a scenario mode that puts you in different, well, scenarios. I only tried the first one so far, being the chip leader at the "final table."

The play isn't too bad - the sims vary their patterns somewhat (at least in the eyes of this novice), but you can still get a read on them. Unfortunately, you can't speed up the gameplay, which means that it can drag on and on if you fold early and/or often. You can change the angle of the camera that views the table, although with a standard TV, anything other than directly overhead will make it hard to read the community cards.

It keeps nice stats: hands won and lost, broken down by pre-flop and post-flop, -turn, and -river, as well as hands by type, average $ won per hand, longest winning and losing streaks, and a couple of others. The averages are kept for single-player, player match, and some other kind of match that I don't remember (the two matches are types of Xbox Live games, I think).

It's a great deal for free, and is probably worth the money if you are slow and can't wait for WSOP to arrive. The achievements seem to be mostly offline (although the Competitive Tournament is probably online, boo) and vary in difficulty. Too bad they don't give out 1000 for arcade games.

UPDATE: I'm docking THe two points. One is for a fairly significant bug: in a tournament, when you're heads-up against an AI player, if he goes all-in as the big blind, he only antes enough to match the little blind, even though it'll show him as all-in, so if you win the hand, he still has chips left (example: if the blinds are 200-400, and he has 340 left, he'll have 140 left after losing as the big blind). Yeah, this is kind of a big bug.

The other is for the game's idiosyncrasies, things that St. T pointed out. For example, the game's insistence on shifting the camera angle to directly overhead when it moves the button and blinds, and the inability to save a single-player tournament in progress. They're not a big deal at first, but after a while, you wonder why they wouldn't have addressed those issues, either prior to release or afterward.

zlionsfan's rating: nickel out of 10. (down from mullet)

Oh yeah, I forgot - one of the achievements is pretty cheap, winning with a high-card hand of 9 or less. You might think this applies only to a full hand, and you'd be wrong. All you have to do is get to heads-up play and have the other guy fold pre-flop. If you're holding 9 or less (no pair, obviously), you've got it.