Kenny Rogers is NOT amused. Neither are we.
Texas Cheat 'Em is an awesome concept... executed with the barest minimum of effort.
Published: June 28, 2009
What the hell, Wideload Games? I've played Stubbs the Zombie, I know you guys have some serious development chops. Hell, you were started by the ex-founder of friggin' Bungie, so seeing something so incredibly... amateurish isn't just disappointing, it's... frustrating. This isn't really an issue of a blah interface (though there's that), nor bare minimum-effort graphics (yeah, there too), nor a complete lack of ambience most of the time (silent and stoic might work in an actual game of poker, but not when you're able to swap out cards -- and no custom soundtrack support if you're not going to give us some tunes? Really?). No, it's that the game simply feels like a hasily-slapped-together attempt to do something different a bit too late after the poker crazy came and went.
And that's the thing; Texas Cheat 'Em is different. It's clear that there was a lot of thought put into make a poker game where the normal rules almost never actually apply, and then despite all that rule-breaking, the game still needed to be balanced. It also had to be made fun (and, uh, rewarding, I suppose) to actually make with the cheating. Though you can attempt to play Cheat 'Em like you would a vanilla game of Hold 'Em -- and you'll probably be able to do fairly well due to the pot being divvied up between the three best hands rather than one person taking it all (a nice way to balance things out) -- that's sort of like having all of Superman's powers and instead opting to live as Clark Kent... when the rest of the world can also fly, shoot lasers from their eyes and fly so fast they go back in time.
The core game is Hold 'Em as you've likely played it a million times by now. Two cards are dealt to all players, the flop drops three more community cards, then the turn and river cards are revealed in between rounds of betting. Small and big blinds shift, one can raise or re-raise and basically play the game as they normally would, except now there's little need (or effectiveness) to playing statistics, odds or even tells because so much can happen during any given hand; cards might get swapped out, chips can be stolen, someone might take an x-ray peek at another hand and so on. Because there's so much happening, and because the actual acts of cheating themselves aren't always known, there's a feeling of wild, uncontrolled mayhem happening with every hand.
Yet it doesn't feel entirely without some structure. The AI in the game as you move up the single-player "career" (really just a bunch of one-off games with basic objectives like pushing out a leader or scooping up cash) is fairly adept at messing with good streaks that you might have going. Because you're rarely pushed completely out of contention for some part of the pot, though, it doesn't feel entirely cheap -- even if it technically kind of is.
It's obvious this isn't a game for hardcore poker players. Most of the strategies that come from watching how other players bet, raise or otherwise react to hands as they're built from what's in the community cards vs. their pocket is thrown out because they might change -- sometimes multiple times -- over the course of a given hand. To make it as clear as possible, the game will always give you a running tally of what your best hand actually is from whatever's on the table and stashed away, and a giant thermometer explains what hands beat others.
And that's the thing; Texas Cheat 'Em is different. It's clear that there was a lot of thought put into make a poker game where the normal rules almost never actually apply, and then despite all that rule-breaking, the game still needed to be balanced. It also had to be made fun (and, uh, rewarding, I suppose) to actually make with the cheating. Though you can attempt to play Cheat 'Em like you would a vanilla game of Hold 'Em -- and you'll probably be able to do fairly well due to the pot being divvied up between the three best hands rather than one person taking it all (a nice way to balance things out) -- that's sort of like having all of Superman's powers and instead opting to live as Clark Kent... when the rest of the world can also fly, shoot lasers from their eyes and fly so fast they go back in time.
The core game is Hold 'Em as you've likely played it a million times by now. Two cards are dealt to all players, the flop drops three more community cards, then the turn and river cards are revealed in between rounds of betting. Small and big blinds shift, one can raise or re-raise and basically play the game as they normally would, except now there's little need (or effectiveness) to playing statistics, odds or even tells because so much can happen during any given hand; cards might get swapped out, chips can be stolen, someone might take an x-ray peek at another hand and so on. Because there's so much happening, and because the actual acts of cheating themselves aren't always known, there's a feeling of wild, uncontrolled mayhem happening with every hand.
Yet it doesn't feel entirely without some structure. The AI in the game as you move up the single-player "career" (really just a bunch of one-off games with basic objectives like pushing out a leader or scooping up cash) is fairly adept at messing with good streaks that you might have going. Because you're rarely pushed completely out of contention for some part of the pot, though, it doesn't feel entirely cheap -- even if it technically kind of is.
It's obvious this isn't a game for hardcore poker players. Most of the strategies that come from watching how other players bet, raise or otherwise react to hands as they're built from what's in the community cards vs. their pocket is thrown out because they might change -- sometimes multiple times -- over the course of a given hand. To make it as clear as possible, the game will always give you a running tally of what your best hand actually is from whatever's on the table and stashed away, and a giant thermometer explains what hands beat others.
