The latest installment in the Howard Lederer-branded World Championship Poker franchise, World Championship Poker: All In, has shipped to stores, according to IGN.com.Marcel Luske, Thomas Bihl, Erin Ness, Robert Williamson III, Annie Duke, Greg Raymer, Amir Vahidi, and Paul Darden join The Professor in this version, which includes a variety of games beyond Texas Hold'Em, including Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, and Omaha. The career mode also adds multi-table tournaments and recurring home games, as well as mixed games.
I haven't had an opportunity to play this release, but I played an earlier version of WCP, and like every other computerized poker game, it had its high and low points. The AI was competent, and it was pretty cool to zip around the globe to play in widely different home games and tournaments, but several minigames -- especially a maddening test of dexterity whenever you attempted to bluff -- took almost all of the fun out of the game for me and it is now gathering dust along Gun and Buns of Steel in my game and DVD drawer.
WCP:AI is currently available for PSP and PS2, and will ship for the 360 in October, but there are some rumblings at the IGN forums about the game locking up and preventing the player from winning a MTT that potential buyers may want to investigate before plunking down five WWdN tourney buy-ins for it. Even if you don't plan to buy the game, I'd suggest reading it, because it's nice to hear poker players complaining about something that is not a bad beat for a change.
1. I picked up WCP2 a few months ago. It felt like it was unbearably slow and I can't bring myself to boot it up anymore. It's a shame since it has so many different types of games in it. Stacked suffers from the same problem. If any poker game developers are reading this, please put in options to turn off all of the comments, animations, and camera motions between actions. It should be possible to set the options so that an offline hand can be played in 10-20 seconds.
Posted at 6:17AM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Alan