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Great Game - Excellent A.I.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

TECHNICAL REVIEW:
I'm running the game on Windows 2000. It works flawlessly except when I go into Phil Hellmuth's Poker School. The video side box with Phil talking cuts in and out(sound); making this part of the game useless. I'm disappointed by this and hope a patch will fix it. Other than that, I haven't experienced any video or sound related problems running 1024x768 screen resolution.

SPEED REVIEW:
Speed Issues:
Normal:
The game in Normal mode is just way too slow all the way around. The PC players react at a snails pace. After one or two games at this speed, you'll be wanting for a faster game.

Medium:
At medium speed, the game is just about right. The pc players make their decisions reasonably quickly as does your own player; most of the time.
Sometimes, even in medium speed, there is an unacceptable delay between your input command being followed. Overall, its ok most of the time.

Here's where the game could be better:
When in medium speed, the game should 'slow down' when 2 or more players go 'all in'. The suspense is a bit lost when the Turn and River cards come up too quickly.

My hope for future versions of the game would be to have pc players to bet within about 4 seconds; about what they do at medium speed now. Then, on an 'all-in' bets to slow down to the 'Normal' level for the turn and river. That would be the best of both worlds!

Fast:
The players fly through their bets like lightning. It's a nice feature to have if you want to play a quick tourney. But, a lot of the game experience is lost when playing fast.

GAMEPLAY, GRAPHICS, AI:
The artificial intelligence is first rate. These pc players are highly skilled. They come over the top & bluff with precision. If you win a bracelet, you've earned it! The graphical representation of the players is good and their voices are real.

CONCLUSION:
A fun game when played at the Medium speed level. Still, to enhance the game, the speed needs to be tweaked a bit; pc players need to make their bets faster and 'All-In' bets slower at Medium speed level. Some technical issues to overcome. A patch would be nice. I totally recommend the game.

Bad Bad Bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 30, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is the worst video game I have ever bought. It would not run on a new laptop running vista. It did run on my desktop running xp. When it did run it was poor at best. My computer locked up several times while it was installed whether it was running or not. When I uninstalled it the problem went away. The brat must have been behind on his mortgage payment to put his name on this trash.World Series of Poker 2008: Battle for the Bracelets

Does not work on my system, period

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

After I play this for 5 minutes, the graphics corrupt to the point where I can't find the exit button. Random images overwrite everything and the game is compltely unplayable.

My system is a quad-core Pentium, Nvidia 8800 gtx with all software updates. I play other demanding games like Crysis, Stalker, COD4 with no corruption or other graphics problems.

This game needs a patch and is unplayable without one. Unfortunately I rushed in head first and bought the game without checking reviews. Please, please heed this advice and do not buy this game until Activision gets a patch out. And even then, wait to see if reviews say the atch is successful.

For now, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

A Good game IF you have the right video card and driver...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I have experienced the same video problems that many others have with this game. When I first purchased the game I was using an ATI X850XT video card and had no problems playing this game. I recently upgraded my video card to an NVidia 8800GT and the game would go "crazy" after about five minutes with flashing and flaky video problems to where I could barely figure out how to exit the game. It was unplayable and very frustrating. I looked for updates from Activision (of which there were NONE) and read many complaints on the net about others having problems as well. I even updated my video drivers to the latest version at the time. Nothing worked UNTIL today! I just updated my video drivers to the latest version (version 169.38) and now it works perfectly! I don't know what it is about the older NVidia drivers, but they fixed something in this latest version that also fixed the video issues with this game. I recommend anyone who has a fairly recent NVidia card to update to this driver version and see if it works for you. I don't think the ATI cards are having same issues, but I could be wrong. Hope this helps! As far as the game itself, it is very enjoyable once it all works and I do recommend it if you can get it to work properly.

Horrible

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 02, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game has so many bugs its unplayable. Installed it on my main gaming system, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs memory, 8800GTX video card and after a few mins of play the video would hang, get jumpy, and eventually the whole game would freeze. After searching the web i saw 1000's of people complaining about the same problems. I saw a few people claim they got the game to work on older systems. So i installed it on my laptop, P4 3ghz, 1 gig mem, with on board video. The end result, not any better. Activision has horrible customer support - would avoid this game like the plauge.

Locks Up Constantly

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Bought this game and my laptop meets all the requirements but about 5-10 hands into any game the video starts going crazy making the game unplayable. Contacted Activision support and they were no help and would not offer a refund. It appears Activision doesnt stand behind their products.

sucks all the way

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Bought this for my hubby, he plays the wsop & wpt circuit events, was all excited about it , and said it is the worst game ever. Nothing seems to work right. His computer is 6 months old cost over 2300.00 , has the best of almost everything .... threw the disk in the trash after trying 3 times to play. I think retarded was his most forgiving part of his review.

These are Pros?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

First off - this game works fine on my four-year old 2.2 MHz P4 running XP Pro. I installed it, it's fine. Gameplay's a little slow (I have it set on "Normal"), but that's more realistic than a lot of online games, frankly. The instructions are non-existent.

But the AI? I've seen reviews that say the players' playing style is just like real life. Umm...not so much. These players all play the same way (so far - I've only had the game for a week.) I've never seen Scotty Nguyen and Johnny Chan check all the way through a hand in a real tournament, and they're not the only ones. All of them are predictable as anything. I had David Williams to my right in my first tournament, and I knew each and every time that, if nobody called and he was in the small blind, he was going to go all in to try to steal my big blind - all I needed was a marginally playable hand to call and bust him. Actually, most of the players do that - go all in in the small blind in a steal attempt. And most of them succeed because the AI player to THEIR left folds every time. In my first tournament, I've been one of the chip leaders throughout and am currently at the final table with six players left. I don't think I'm really good enough to do that well against the REAL pros. If I thought I were really this good, I'd have no problem shelling out ten grand to play in next year's Main Event.

Then there are their lines. If I hear Scotty Nguyen say, "You trying to push me out just because I'm short-stacked, baby?" one more time, I think I'll scream. Other players have equally repetitive lines.

BTW, if you can't see your cards, hit the backspace button. Just like the picture shows.

For better hold'em play, I recommend "Stacked" if you can find it (it's pretty inexpensive these days). But this game includes all of the games included in the real WSOP, which was its main selling point as far as I was concerned.

Obvious console port to PC makes a sub par PC game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I play online poker pretty regularly, watched the World Series of Poker for the past few years and was excited to "play with the pros". Installed on a machine that plays World of Warcraft, Titan Quest and other mainstream games at average graphics settings. Pentium 4, 750MB memory, nvidia 6 series graphics card. Not the latest technologies but good enough.

Voices are out of sync with animations. Animations run extremely slow for some reason. Key shortcuts on the one page instruction pamphlet are incorrect. The user interface is not very intuitive. The game is made for joystick play and little was done to make it usable for mouse/keyboard.

Game play is reasonable once you mire through the animations. Poker tips are helpful.

Even though Activision is the first animation you see, there is no support on their web site. You instead need to go to Activision Value. There are no support solutions for the game on the Activision Value web site. After contacting them about patches and/or graphics performance improvements, they said neither were available.

Play some other poker game instead because you do not get quality time with the celebrities in the game.

Disappointment Turned to Anger

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: December 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

After waiting anxiously for my weekend to devote to playing my new game, I went to "options" first to get rid of the gawd-awful music. Not only did I not have a choice on the audio, I couldn't even exit. The usual escape of Ctrl-Alt-Delete was useless and I had to turn off my computer. By then I was pretty disgusted but I really wanted to play the game so I started it up again. But after 10 minutes of utter frustratiion in not being able to see my cards, I decided to exit. Guess what? No exit button. No way for me to exit except to turn off my computer again. This morning I went to uninstall the game and accidently right clicked on the icon and the darn game started up. Guess how I had to exit. Right. This game has been the worst disappointment in my video gaming history.

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