User Reviews (1 - 11 of 21)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

GREAT for the beginner and casual gamer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I just bought this game after having played it for a few hours at a friends house. I have been playing it for awhile now, have had no problems with it; it has been a blast! The only suggestion that I would say for next time is to add online play or multiplayer mode. Finally, I've seen people complain about installation problems... I had no problems installing it whatsoever and it runs very smoothly. Enjoy!

WSOP - Challenging

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game gives you a perspective of sitting at a live table. You can play a season of tournaments or set up a table of 9 to play a private custom tournament. Many styles of poker to learn, which helps you become a better wager. Have fun and learn more about your style of play !!!!!

WSOP Poker

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 19, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I got this for my son for Christmas and he loves it. He can now "play with the pros." The graphics are fabulous and you feel like you are at the table playing poker with the greatest players.

Not very challenging

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: May 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am not really sure why everyone is having problems with this program crashing. I have literally played it for days straight as I have nothing else to do on the week ends. I wonder if it is their computers. I use a 1 1/2 old laptop so it doesn't take much to keep the game going. The only problems I have had are if I quit in the middle of a tournament. Then that game will always lock up. I either finish the tournament or go all in to finish it quickly. No problems since that

I do have a couple of problems with the game itself though. First, it is not very challenging. After I day I have won or placed in at least half of the tournaments. I do not play much poker and almost never watch it on TV. If an amateur like me can do that well I think the really experienced players would not like this at all.

Second, there is a little status screen on the left that is very useful but I could not figure out why it seemed to be there randomly. Here is the secret; it only appears in the first tournament that you play after starting it up fresh. If you want to keep it in subsequent tournaments you will need to exit and then reload, wallah it is there.

Third, if you fold on seven card stud the game does not finish things off like in the other tournaments. You have to sit and press deal for each subsequent round of that hand. It gets very annoying very quickly.

Fourth, the announcers on the game are so random. You think they would program it respond more appropriately. I had a straight flush and another player had a royal flush. We both went all in. At the end the computer says: "You have to wonder what he was thinking playing that hand." On other hands when I am bluffing and fall far short its response will be inappropriately encouraging.

All in all I play this because I don't have much else to do living in the wilds of Thailand. If I had better access to books, movies or other games I would not

Not great but...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game is not perfect, and it crashed my meager 384 megs of RAM a couple of times, but I played a $2000 no limit game for four or five (maybe eight) hours. I came in 4th. I also got sent to the rails four times. I am still looking for the game but this one is fun.

It's not that bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I think this game sucks. It sucks for pretty much all of the complaints already listed. Plus, has anyone else noticed that when someone goes all in and there is a side pot, if they win they win the side pot and the main pot? Am I the only one who has noticed that? It would also be nice if I knew where the bubble was. I mean, why would you risk going all in and finish out of the money if you could just hold out and let someone else burst the bubble? Some other people can get the AI to fold, but I can't seem to. It just isn't realistic for me to put someone all in only to see them call with 8-3. I also didn't like the full screen thing. I play on my laptop and sometimes I like to do multiple things at once. I couldn't minimize the game at all.

Have I gotten my money's worth? Yes, without a doubt. Because I have wasted several hours playing that game. Are there a lot of glitches? Yes. I had to reload it and it worked much better. Would I buy it again. Yes, if they revamped it by listening to some real player feedback and put those suggestions into the next version. It is a good game because it allows you to practice some games you might not be able to play otherwise like Razz. If they added HORSE or HOSE it would have just about every game offered at the real WSOP. I love pot-limit games and they have hold 'em and Omaha pot-limit games. I bought a different poker game that also cost $20. Was it worth it? Yes. It had better graphics, the players were all recognized pros, the betting calculator was ALWAYS right, and it was a good learning tool because the AI played they way you would expect people to play when you are trying to raise your game. The only problem was it offered limit hold 'em and NLHE.

So, WSOP by Activision sucks because it has flaws and it's not all that realistic (even live donkeys don't play that badly). But, it's pretty much worth the $20 because you can spend several hours playing it and you won't have to play the same game twice.

Not half bad but falls short in some places

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Pro's, the grafix are good, the tutorials are helpfull, and the game is easy to use and figure out.
Con's, there is no way to play online or with other computer users, unlike the playstation version of this game you cant customize your player, there are two "sports commentaters" that comment on every play but they have limited comments that get real old real fast(you can turn them off).
It's a fun game to play and it's one of my favorits. I only payed $10 for the game and I got what I paid for.

poor game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

program ran first but locked up second time. did not like the lay out of ther table.

Most disappointing game I have ever played. If you must buy this title, buy the Console Version, not the PC version.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 45 / 49
Date: October 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Let me open by saying that had I bought the console version of the game instead of the PC version, I probably would not have been nearly as disappointed and would not be writing this review. I have not yet played the console version, but I have watched some video and screen shots in addition to researching just about every review written for this title from various gaming sites. Though both the console and PC versions are published by Activision Value (key word being Value), upon further review, it look likes the development of the PC version of the game was done by an entirely different company (Toybox Games) than the console version (Left Field Productions), and other than the recorded voice for the commentary and the concept of the game itself, the two versions should be considered and reviewed as completely different games. The only game reviewer out there that I found to have done a review on both the PS2 version and the PC version at this time is GameSpot, in which the same reviewer gave the PS2 version a 6.8 and the PC version a 4.7, which I thought was rather generous, but still rates a poor on their scale. He probably wasn't able to take as much time to evaluate the game as I have.

(...)

In the PC version, there are a whopping total of 2 camera angles. The overhead camera for viewing the flop-turn-river in which all you see is the felt, cards, static face shots of the players in the hand, and the dealers hand movement revealing the community cards. And then there is the other camera angle, which you will be spending most of your time viewing as you always sit in seat 9 at the table. To give you a better idea of how rudimentary this game is, after installation I found the bulk of the game is comprised of bitmaps and wav files. Every graphic in the game can be found in one of the bitmap files, of which there are a total of 3826 that eat up a bit over a gigabyte of space. This may seem like quite a few images, but keep in mind, this represents every object in the game, whether it is backgrounds, chips, menus, loading screen, cards, player faces for display on in between hand screens, tutorial help screens, and character animations. For instance, there are 468 separate bmp files alone representing face up cards from each position on the table (9 seats * 52 cards), half of these particular images being no bigger than a few pixels in height. The player animations are no more complex than pre-rendered bitmaps which comprise all movement each character can possibly make in the game. While sprite animation was great back in the 1980s, it surprises me that this game developer couldn't be a bit more resourceful today. Each player in the game will always sit at the same seat location every game, every tournament. So no matter how many times you're at the table with Chris Ferguson, he will always be at seat 1. Though 9 players have recognizable names from the WSOP and somewhat resemble their appearance, you won't be able to distinguish their game play from any other player at the table. There are five possible players that will sit at each seat, giving a total of 40 players that will ever be encountered in this game. There are only 5 women players in this game, and they will always be located at seat 4. The players that sit in a particular seat also seem to have similar appearance and animation as their other 4 counterparts.

As far as the audio goes, there are a total of 455 wav files comprising the music, clapping, ambient sound, effects, and commentary. Again, this is rather shallow once you break it down. For instance there are 7 wav files for each card that may be called out from the announcer, comprising 91 of your 455 possible sounds. As a side note, I don't even recall hearing individual cards are called out by the announcer, so it's possible these 91 wav files are not in use. While the variety of voice infliction is nice, there simply isn't enough variety in dialog and therefore it becomes very repetitive. Often times the commentary is not even appropriate for the situation. I don't know how many times I've raised the amount of the blind and bluffed everyone out of a pot only to hear Lon say I clearly had the best hand at the table when holding a 7-2 off suit, and he makes it seem like I just took down a monster pot, when it was just the blinds. And Lon will quite often say something to the effect of 'he makes a cautious raise' during a limit game where there is no choice in how much or little you raise. There is no voice from anyone other than Lon and the other announcer and there is only one player introduction wav, which happens to be for Chris Ferguson.

The AI seems to generally play conservative, and can easily be bluffed out of the hand, especially pre-flop without a pocket pair or ace-king, but tends to stay in to the end when presented with a flush or straight draw after the flop until the river when you'll know by betting whether or not it has anything. What is quite annoying is there is no change in the way your opponents play as the number of players at the final table diminishes. In heads up action, your opponent will still fold on almost anything in his hand pre-flop, which causes dozens of hands to go by sometimes before there is any action. Unless you're lucky enough to also have something that's playable then, it's probably best to fold, which means that the game play experience in heads-up is not really there. The AI is quite predictable taking most of the fun and challenge out of the game.

As annoying as the graphics, sound, and AI are over time, had there been some thought and research put into the actual experience of playing in a WSOP tournament, this game still could have been somewhat enjoyable. Unfortunately, at least as far as the PC version of this game goes, there are some serious issues here also. While you're playing in a tournament, there are statistics on the tournament that show you overall chip position and players left. These stats are rather meaningless as it all activity outside your current table is really nonexistent and therefore, you will only see changes in the statistics when something happens in your game. For example, you will never see the number of players left in the tournament drop until a player from your table has been eliminated, and then it drops by a set number proportionate to the total number of players that entered the tournament. Therefore, you may see it go from 710 players remaining to 658 after one hand and no matter how many players entered the tournament, there is a predictable number of players that need to be eliminated from your table, which I believe is around 15, to reach the final table. It doesn't matter if it is a tournament of 200 players or the main event. What makes this really bad is as you approach getting to the final table, the number of chips brought in from players joining your table will be significantly higher. Because the number of total players who played at your table up until the final would be about 24 and the rest of the field's chips are suddenly given to the few remaining players that join your final table, the final table will inevitably consist of a few players that have very huge chip stacks in comparison to the players you have been playing with, one of which will likely have up to ten plus times the chips the previous chip leader had at your table. Because of this design flaw alone, any hope of feeling like you're getting the WSOP experience is all but taken away. In addition to this, because the final table happens so prematurely, the blinds are usually much less than what they need to be at the final table, given the total amount of chips. In career mode the blinds are raised at 12 minute intervals and it can take hours from the start of a tournament for them to approach worthwhile levels at a final table. This is especially painful in a limit game. Even though there is no customization built into the game regarding career mode tournaments, there is the ability to manipulate one of the plain text files that hold the current tournament data. While you're messing around, go ahead and give yourself a few extra WSOP bracelets... no one will care.

Lastly, there is at least one stability issue I am aware of. I believe there is a problem with an animation of one of the female characters named Nathalie that causes the game to crash. While it is possible to resume the tournament after a crash, this player will still be sitting at your table and I find myself replacing this character with another, again by manipulating the game data stored in the text files.

Having a programming background myself, the poor quality of this game all around greatly disappointed me. Even though this is value priced software, I would strongly discourage anyone from buying the PC version. Not having played it yet, I cannot recommend the console versions at this time, but from my perspective it would be the clear choice if you are looking to buy this title. Given that the console versions were developed by a different company and based on the reviews, there is little doubt that in my mind they are anywhere near as bad as this version. However, more poker titles are on the way, one which is coming out soon that looks promising. It may be best to muck this title and bet that future poker games are not such a bad flop.

This game is junk!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: November 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have installed this software on my Win XP system and my Win 98 system. It crashes on both systems so often I cannot complete a game successfully. ActiVision's support page says to exit all other programs to correct the problem. First; if they cannot write software that is compatible with my system with other programs running, then I have no use for their product. Second; following these instructions did NOT solve the problem. It still crashes all the time.

Besides that the game play leaves much to be desired. It is imposable to know what the payoff structure is of a given tournament, and the computer characters all use the same strategy making their play too predictable to be any challenge after a few hours of playing the game.

On the positive side: The graphics are acceptable. If ActiVision was able to fix the bugs I would still not be satisfied with the game. The shortcomings are too many and too major. As it is I have uninstalled it from both my systems and will probably use the CD as a Frisbee. That way I can at least get some enjoyment out of it!

Review Page: 1 2 3 Next 

Actions