[Mini-Review] STACKED with Daniel Negreanu
It's the best portable game of poker out there, but once again that doesn't mean it's great.
Published: November 4, 2006
[The Good]
This is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same game as the PS2 version, so this review is mostly the same. The differences are mainly negative, so move down to The Bad if you're curious about those.
10 years is a long time to spend on building an artificial intelligence routine that can act like a human, and even more impressive when all that data is poured into something like poker, which one could argue is almost entirely about human responses (the cards certainly help, too). Thus, a poker video game is only as good as the kind of responses it can generate from the computer-controller players, and in this respect STACKED is better than any game that has come before it.
Unfortunately, it's still not perfect. Call it a successful test drive of the University of Alberta's Poki and Zen AI, the two bits of computer consciousness that power the limit and no-limit poker games that populate STACKED. They are indeed able to read how you play and react accordingly, slowly learning how you bluff, when you go all-in (or raise, or check) and adjusts accordingly.
Though there was supposed to be a couple different types of personality to react to these things, aside from hardcore Rocks and Maniacs -- those would be the terms Mr. Negreanu uses -- you'll never really understand the nuances of characters, and thus it's hard to play differently per character. You can apply a broad approach to things, trying to set traps and milking pots to try to rake in more cash, but forget trying to picking real people behind those randomly generated avatars set up by the computer.
Those terms, plus a whole lot more poker terminology, is laid out in the half hour or so of poker tutorials in the game's pre-recorded poker school bits supplied by Daniel Negreanu, and they're actually quite interesting. You'll learn more in those couple minutes about some of the more advanced bits of poker, raging from how limit and no-limit Texas Hold 'Em is played than you'd ever get in any other poker game. More advanced stuff like position and how to play against specific poker players is all in play, and this is actually useful when playing against real people online.
Thanks to heavy branding with MTV, there's no shortage of players online either, which is a serious plus. Officially sanctioned tourneys and TV shows centered around them are all planned, which means the game should have considerably more life than most poker games offer. Yeah, you have to pay to play online (which you can do for free on the PC), but at least this way there's some real money involved and some lively interaction.
[The Bad]
That's precisely what you won't get offline with STACKED, though. It's a plodding, almost grueling process. That's poker, of course, but the key here is to remember that this is still a no-frills game of poker. And as handy as having Danny Boy as the giver of advice in the game is, his comments are almost always situation-specific without ever having any real context, and there are times that it's just flat-out wrong. It's a serious detriment to trying to learn how to handle some basic situations for new players, and later on in the game it just plain nullifies any
Then there's the presentation. STACKED isn't a terribly ugly game, you would have anyone craning their necks up at the camera at impossible angles randomly like in World Poker Tour, but then you don't have nearly the same number of customization options for your character. In fact, aside from some palette swaps, most of your choices lean rather heavily toward either the female "hoochie" template or the "mega-gut old guy" motif on either end of the sexual spectrum.
The interface was designed for easy access, mapping the most common options to the d-pad, along you to fold, raise and call/check bets with just a tap up or down. Pressing right on the d-pad will roll out a quick menu where you can ask for that questionable advice, force a show of emotion and so on, and a tap of the Triangle Button will let you peek at your cards. The problem with this is that it doesn't allow a fine amount of control for things like raising. After about five clicks, the amount to toss into the pot rockets up by a couple hundred, then thousands. Using something like the shoulder buttons' analog function to scale things up and down depending on how hard you press would have been far, far more effective, and the system as it stands now means a ton of tap-and-pause moves.
Then there are the little things. The fact that no matter what kind of bankroll you have, you somehow have magical chips that carry that amount in just a few pieces (or, more likely, the developers were just oddly lazy), it just makes the game feel cheap. Normally, I'd say a couple more polygons wouldn't kill the game, but it seems to seriously choke for no reason. At least the environments are nicely imagined, but you'll have a lot of time to check them out, since the games you'll be played can very easily go four hours for just a simple table game.
The PSP carries with it a couple of distinct disadvantages, not the least of which are a massive amount of loading (a good minute for most games, though at least once they start you can spend an hour playing without any more) and an absolute crap framerate. There's also apparently two different executables on the UMD, so any time you want to play wirelessly (and the game does support Infrastructure, which is awesome), you have to reboot the game, starting over from the main menu. Why they didn't just do this from the start is a head-scratcher.
[The Verdict]
So STACKED isn't a particularly well-presented game. The fundamentals are there, though, meaning you can actually play against the AI and feel like it's challenging you, and with a solid online presence, there's plenty of challenge there too. It's just that despite all the hoopla and the delay in getting the game finished, there's really nothing here to justify it presentation-wise. There's solid poker to be had here (even if it's just Texas Hold 'Em -- something that other poker games beat many times over in variety).
Still, this was a successful experiment, offering the kind of progress toward a poker game that can play as well offline as it does online -- and one step toward getting AI interaction that actually feels like a real person. Thanks to some wonky recommendations from Negreanu and an obvious lack of what would seem like common-sense graphics options, this isn't a must-buy poker game, but it is better than anything else out there. Sadly, that's still not saying much.
This is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same game as the PS2 version, so this review is mostly the same. The differences are mainly negative, so move down to The Bad if you're curious about those.
10 years is a long time to spend on building an artificial intelligence routine that can act like a human, and even more impressive when all that data is poured into something like poker, which one could argue is almost entirely about human responses (the cards certainly help, too). Thus, a poker video game is only as good as the kind of responses it can generate from the computer-controller players, and in this respect STACKED is better than any game that has come before it.
Unfortunately, it's still not perfect. Call it a successful test drive of the University of Alberta's Poki and Zen AI, the two bits of computer consciousness that power the limit and no-limit poker games that populate STACKED. They are indeed able to read how you play and react accordingly, slowly learning how you bluff, when you go all-in (or raise, or check) and adjusts accordingly.
Though there was supposed to be a couple different types of personality to react to these things, aside from hardcore Rocks and Maniacs -- those would be the terms Mr. Negreanu uses -- you'll never really understand the nuances of characters, and thus it's hard to play differently per character. You can apply a broad approach to things, trying to set traps and milking pots to try to rake in more cash, but forget trying to picking real people behind those randomly generated avatars set up by the computer.
Those terms, plus a whole lot more poker terminology, is laid out in the half hour or so of poker tutorials in the game's pre-recorded poker school bits supplied by Daniel Negreanu, and they're actually quite interesting. You'll learn more in those couple minutes about some of the more advanced bits of poker, raging from how limit and no-limit Texas Hold 'Em is played than you'd ever get in any other poker game. More advanced stuff like position and how to play against specific poker players is all in play, and this is actually useful when playing against real people online.
Thanks to heavy branding with MTV, there's no shortage of players online either, which is a serious plus. Officially sanctioned tourneys and TV shows centered around them are all planned, which means the game should have considerably more life than most poker games offer. Yeah, you have to pay to play online (which you can do for free on the PC), but at least this way there's some real money involved and some lively interaction.
[The Bad]
That's precisely what you won't get offline with STACKED, though. It's a plodding, almost grueling process. That's poker, of course, but the key here is to remember that this is still a no-frills game of poker. And as handy as having Danny Boy as the giver of advice in the game is, his comments are almost always situation-specific without ever having any real context, and there are times that it's just flat-out wrong. It's a serious detriment to trying to learn how to handle some basic situations for new players, and later on in the game it just plain nullifies any
Then there's the presentation. STACKED isn't a terribly ugly game, you would have anyone craning their necks up at the camera at impossible angles randomly like in World Poker Tour, but then you don't have nearly the same number of customization options for your character. In fact, aside from some palette swaps, most of your choices lean rather heavily toward either the female "hoochie" template or the "mega-gut old guy" motif on either end of the sexual spectrum.
The interface was designed for easy access, mapping the most common options to the d-pad, along you to fold, raise and call/check bets with just a tap up or down. Pressing right on the d-pad will roll out a quick menu where you can ask for that questionable advice, force a show of emotion and so on, and a tap of the Triangle Button will let you peek at your cards. The problem with this is that it doesn't allow a fine amount of control for things like raising. After about five clicks, the amount to toss into the pot rockets up by a couple hundred, then thousands. Using something like the shoulder buttons' analog function to scale things up and down depending on how hard you press would have been far, far more effective, and the system as it stands now means a ton of tap-and-pause moves.
Then there are the little things. The fact that no matter what kind of bankroll you have, you somehow have magical chips that carry that amount in just a few pieces (or, more likely, the developers were just oddly lazy), it just makes the game feel cheap. Normally, I'd say a couple more polygons wouldn't kill the game, but it seems to seriously choke for no reason. At least the environments are nicely imagined, but you'll have a lot of time to check them out, since the games you'll be played can very easily go four hours for just a simple table game.
The PSP carries with it a couple of distinct disadvantages, not the least of which are a massive amount of loading (a good minute for most games, though at least once they start you can spend an hour playing without any more) and an absolute crap framerate. There's also apparently two different executables on the UMD, so any time you want to play wirelessly (and the game does support Infrastructure, which is awesome), you have to reboot the game, starting over from the main menu. Why they didn't just do this from the start is a head-scratcher.
[The Verdict]
So STACKED isn't a particularly well-presented game. The fundamentals are there, though, meaning you can actually play against the AI and feel like it's challenging you, and with a solid online presence, there's plenty of challenge there too. It's just that despite all the hoopla and the delay in getting the game finished, there's really nothing here to justify it presentation-wise. There's solid poker to be had here (even if it's just Texas Hold 'Em -- something that other poker games beat many times over in variety).
Still, this was a successful experiment, offering the kind of progress toward a poker game that can play as well offline as it does online -- and one step toward getting AI interaction that actually feels like a real person. Thanks to some wonky recommendations from Negreanu and an obvious lack of what would seem like common-sense graphics options, this isn't a must-buy poker game, but it is better than anything else out there. Sadly, that's still not saying much.
