Written by dgoldring on Friday, October 3, 2008

Review: Texas Hold’em for iPhone


texas hold'em

I have always loved playing poker.  I still remember when I was young, and my friend’s Dad taught me how to play seven card draw.  I won’t say I was hooked (because that might imply something far more sinister) but I had a blast playing.  Since then, I have been a member of both regular and (more often) semi-regular poker tables.  And I am always hunting for the latest and greatest electronic poker games on whatever device I am currently using.

I love playing these games electronically for two reasons.  First, have you ever tried to explain to your wife that you just lost $10,000 playing poker?  Yeah, much easier when it is imaginary money.  And second, it is much easier to win every once in a while.

So, with that in mind I decided to try out Texas Hold’em for the iPhone, one of the few games which was actually developed by Apple itself.

texas hold'em

I am not going to spend a lot of time here discussing the rules and intricacies of poker.  Needless to say, there are dozens of variations of the game, all of which are based on making the best possible hand of five cards.  In Texas Hold’em, which is the most popular variation in the world right now (thank you ESPN and The World Series of Poker), each player is dealt two cards face down, then five community cards.  You can use any combination of cards from your hand and the community pile to make a five card hand.

texas hold'emwhich you can scroll through, cover flow style

OK, with that out of the way, it is time to visit the Casinos.  There are ten different casinos in this game, which you can scroll through, cover flow style.  They will whisk you away to exotic locations around the world from the garage to Istanbul, and ultimately landing in the highest stake event in Dubai.  Each casino requires a progressively larger buy-in in order to join.  Beginning with the garage, which requires no buy-in; all the way up to Dubai and its $100,000.

 texas hold'em

In order to advance from one casino to the next, you will need to win tournaments at the lower stakes tables.  Each time you place in the top three in an event, you will win a payout (obviously, the higher stakes casinos offer higher payouts).  The nice thing here is that although you need to win money to join the higher stakes games, there is no order in which you must play the different casinos.  As long as you have enough money to cover the buy-in, you can play anywhere you like.

 IMG_0115 IMG_0105

Once you enter the casino, you will notice some amazing graphics.  In addition to yourself, there are eight other players at each table, plus a dealer.  Watch these folks carefully.  This is not your typical card game animation.  These characters were made by filming and then digitizing live actors.  So, they have incredibly lifelike reactions, including a unique “tell” for each character.  I did notice, however, that there are only about 12 different characters, so you will see the same people at every casino.  It would have been nice if each casino featured a unique cast of characters in order to add to the variety.

texas hold'em

Regardless of the animation, I found this view was not conducive to great poker playing.  You can only see one player at a time, and I quickly lost track of which players were still in, who was sitting in which seat, and how much money each player had in their chip stack.  I needed a different view.  So, almost by accident, I turned my iPod Touch on its side. Remember that accelerometer?  Well, the view shifted right along with me. 

When you spin the iPod Touch on its side, you will switch into a bird’s eye view.  From here, you can see all of the players at the table, and quickly assess their positions, their remaining chip stacks, and the status of their bets.

texas hold'em

The only thing I really did not like was betting.  When you want to bet or raise, tap the screen and a betting wheel will appear.  Spin the wheel until your desired bet is displayed.  Not only is this incredibly imprecise (I was constantly spinning right past and betting $105 instead of $100); but it also is contrary to the uber-realism in the rest of the game.  I wish Apple had stuck with a more traditional animation for entering your bets.

texas hold'em

The final feature I wanted to mention is multiplayer mode.  If you get tired of playing against computerized opponents, just fire up multiplayer mode to start taking fake money from your real friends.  The game allows you to play against up to eight friends at a time, and you can choose from any of the locations in the game.  The catch here, however, is that you and your friends must all be connected to the same wireless network.  Unlike other multiplayer games (such as the fantastic Real Dice Multiplayer Championship Poker) you cannot find opponents over the Internet, which I thought was unfortunate.  I rarely have one poker playing friend connected to my network, let alone eight.

texas hold'em

Overall, not only was this among the best games I have played on the iPod Touch, but it is also one of the best poker games I have played on any platform.  I love the animation of the individual characters, with detail as slight as individualized tells.  And it is the only poker game which lets you switch between viewing modes by simply flicking (actually turning) your wrist.  So, ante up and get ready to play because this table’s hot and that extra seat is just waiting for you.

Name: Texas Hold’em

Developer: Apple

Platform: iPod Touch 2.1 (first gen.)

Price: $9.99

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More in Reviews, iPhone/iPod Touch | 4 Comments


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birdsoft
Oct 6, 2008

Thanks Doug.
This is actually the only game I purchased for my Touch in trying to decide if the iPhone is a good candidate for a port of my upcoming 3.0 version of All-In(cant tell you what all it involves but one is a facelift, some reviewer recently said it looks like a game from 2004 :) ). And well at first I was blown away by this game(and a little bewildered that Apple decided they needed to cannibalize on the biggest genres in their AppStore). It has great graphics!! Though admittedly like you I thought the “filmed” individual player portrait mode was a neat idea, but a pain to play poker with just as you found. It helps sell copies though. But the landscape full table mode with some of the neat little extra touches made this a fun game(it does have a little All-In type feel), and the added cover flow “casinos” was a nice touch.

But then I played it a while, and it is EASY!!! Yeah, I may be a little better than average player and I did figure it out quite quickly myself, but the reviews in the AppStore even tell you how to. Right now I have over $700K in the game after playing 16 tournaments, with 62% record of placing, over 30% firsts (and ALL of the games I didnt place in involved me getting in with the better hand(usually much better) and the computer player sucking out, so that at least is real). So needless to say the AI is scary bad, and is very easy to beat.

And ‘Multi-Player’ is a buzz word and putting it in sells copies of games too, whether its good or not, and while I do think it would be fun to play that way once, any time Im with 8 poker playing friends, we play with a deck and chips…

So while Im still trying to decide the AI is the main factor I am considering. I can probably compete close to them graphics wise in Landscape, but I believe All-In’s AI is so much superior that Im considering going for it just for that alone(and then more options and a few of the things from 3.0).

RealDice has similarly bad AI and last I checked they still didnt even have the poker rules quite right, and their Multi-Player even a few years later you just go online and have an All-In fest with a few random people on their servers so that NEVER ends up being real quality poker(unless you setup a game with your friends), so….

Any thoughts from others. Do you think in this poker age, that there are enough poker players with good game that want a little higher end AI on the iPhone?

Hmmmmm….


birdsoft
Oct 6, 2008

Thanks Doug.
This is actually the only game I purchased for my Touch in trying to decide if the iPhone is a good candidate for a port of my upcoming 3.0 version of All-In(cant tell you what all it involves but one is a facelift, some reviewer recently said it looks like a game from 2004 :) ). And well at first I was blown away by this game(and a little bewildered that Apple decided they needed to cannibalize on the biggest genres in their AppStore). It has great graphics! Though admittedly like you I thought the “filmed” individual player portrait mode was a neat idea, but a pain to play poker with just as you found. It helps sell copies though. But the landscape full table mode with some of the neat little extra touches made this a fun game(it does have a little All-In type feel), and the added cover flow “casinos” was a nice touch.

But then I played it a while, and it is EASY!!! Yeah, I may be a little better than average player and I did figure it out quite quickly myself, but the reviews in the AppStore even tell you how to. Right now I have over $700K in the game after playing 16 tournaments, with 62% record of placing, over 30% firsts (and ALL of the games I didnt place in involved me getting in with the better hand(usually much better) and the computer player sucking out, so that at least is real). So needless to say the AI is scary bad, and is very easy to beat.

And ‘Multi-Player’ is a buzz word and putting it in sells copies of games too, whether its good or not, and while I do think it would be fun to play that way once, any time Im with 8 poker playing friends, we play with a deck and chips…

So while Im still trying to decide the AI is the main factor I am considering. I can probably compete close to them graphics wise in Landscape, but I believe All-In’s AI is so much superior that Im considering going for it just for that alone(and then more options and a few of the things from 3.0)..

RealDice has similarly bad AI and last I checked they still didnt even have the poker rules quite right, and their Multi-Player even a few years later you just go online and have an All-In fest with a few random people on their servers so that NEVER ends up being real quality poker(unless you setup a game with your friends), so….

Any thoughts from others. Do you think in this poker age, that there are enough poker players with good game that want a little higher end AI on the iPhone?

Hmmmmm….


dgoldring
Oct 6, 2008

Brian, I agree with you that the AI is not as good as many of the Poker games I have played. But it is still not the worst. :)

I think if you make a game with good graphics and AI then there is absolutely room for another Poker Game. One thing I would like to see is more of a Poker package where you can play different variations. There are a lot out there, as you know.

I really liked the approach of letting you choose between portrait and landscape and switching between them was pretty seamless.

Like I said, though. My biggest complaint was the betting system. What’s wrong with just tapping stacks of chips.

Can’t wait to see your update of All-In.

Doug


birdsoft
Oct 6, 2008

Fair enough.. I guarantee you I would be a pro poker player if real live poker was like this though. :) It is very weak.

Yeah, I never tried switching back and forth. If I did something it would be more All-In like and always still be top down, unless I go with an option for another format too…

Your idea on “package” is noted, though I wont confirm or deny anything at this point… :)

For some reason I actually liked their betting system spin wheel… Though partially because accuracy of bets just isnt important as the AI would make entirely too big a bets almost every time in late position. I liked the flicking of the cards too, but the fact that you could flick the cards but occasionally catch the chips instead(and go all-in with that motion) was a little scary….

Actually, just got my Developer Program Ok, so I just loaded up my first iPhone game on my iPod Touch like 10 minutes ago, and gave it a go… Neat…. Should be submitted by Friday.

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