Poker, or Texas Hold ‘em to a greater extent, has been all the rage these days. At least that’s how it looks in suburbia New York, where the only other thing you’ll find from Texas is a jar of El Paso salsa. Sure, my buddies from work and I play poker every Sunday night after the store closes; and sure, I lose a good $20 a week, but there’s much fun to be had in the entire experience. Eh, whom am I kidding, losing sucks. So when I heard a casino game was finally arriving on the Xbox, I was ready to just have fun online with some friends, but this time, to lose fake money. Bicycle Casino is the first of a wave of casino games to be released on the next generation consoles. Let’s see how the first crack at this genre in recent years paid off and let’s see where it faltered.
The first thing I noticed by looking at the cover in the store was the Xbox Live capabilities of this title. All you needed to tell me was that I could go online and play other people around the world in Texas Hold ‘em and I would have been sold. When I learned that I could take virtually all the games available and play them on Live as well, it only confirmed my excitement for this title.
When you first begin, you need to create a profile. This also entails a list of options like facial features, skin color, clothes, and extras like sunglasses and matching pimp hat. This is the appearance you character will take on when sitting at a table both online and off. Once you decide what your character will look like, the fun (or lack thereof) begins.
With all your options set, you have a plethora of games before you just waiting to be played including eight types of Poker, Blackjack, Money Wheel, Craps, Video Poker, Slot Machines, Roulette, Keno, and Pai Gow. The attention getter of “500 Game Variations” found on the cover on this title is extremely misleading. They must have played with the numbers to get this figure, but even so, I expected nothing less from a game based on a Casino experience, where the odds are never in your favor.
You start off with an even $1000. You can only go up from here because if you lose it all, the game will reset you back to that same $1000. To get myself familiar with the game and how it played, I started to play some random poker games offline like 5 –Card Draw, Omaha, and finally Hold ‘em. I accrued a few thousand on top of my starting bankroll and decided to take my skills online. I joined a Hold ‘em table with four other players just like myself. Each poker table will always have a total of eight players. The three remaining empty seats were automatically filled with AI opponents. Though I really wouldn’t consider them true opponents; droids is more like it. I’ll divulge into this a bit later.
You can also take on some games that are solely based on luck and require little to no skill at all. Money Wheel has you betting on what dollar amount the wheel will land on next and the odds are posted accordingly to the odds of the payout. Roulette is similar but with many variations of a bet; payout is based on what color and number the ball lands on in the roulette wheel. Keno is like playing the lottery in a sense. In a nutshell, the more numbers you match, the more money you win.
Moving on to some other familiar card games, Blackjack is another favorite of casino goers. You take a seat in a table of a total of four opponents at all times. You play against the dealer and bet per hand. The rough objective is to get the closest and including 21 without going over. The higher hand without going over beats the dealer. I’ve found this to be most relaxing out of all the games since you’re all playing against the dealer and not each other. Taking this game online is pretty straightforward. Actually, the online play in general is pretty barebones. But with it being a casino game and all, I honestly did not expect any additional bells and whistles.
Going online with this title is a most uneventful experience. Now, I have played online poker on my PC with people before, so I had a reference on how it should all work. What I found was a shortage of online players in games like roulette and some variations of poker like 5-Card or Omaha. To put it this way, it seems that 90% of the people that bought this game purchased it for the sole purpose to play Hold ‘em online. So I had to oblige to what the rest of the crowd is playing. Connectivity is honestly not an issue since I have yet to get disconnected while playing this game online; but then again, there are no explosions and car chases…it’s a card game online. I knew this going in, but the overall wooden presentation of the game in general does not make the online play any more eventful or fun to take part in. There are a large portion of the online players that simply do not speak by choice; this is a different story than some other games on Live. It all sums up to an overall boring experience where I thought it would be fun and entertaining.
Of course, each game can vary in what set limits you choose, as well as changing from a standard game to a tournament style game. This is true for both online and offline games.
Now coming back to the stolid AI opponents, I found that they’d bet thousands of dollars with a bad hand at Poker for no reason. And sometimes they’ll get frugal with three of a kind. It almost seems that their betting methods are entirely at random. It makes for frustrating and at times, easier gameplay. It’s a characteristic that casino games have been suffering from for years. I remember playing Caesar’s Palace for the Dreamcast back in the day and it having the same rough spots.
A huge disappointment came from the lack of offline multiplayer. Unfortunately, you cannot have a friend over and play online together. Though I realize this would make playing poker impossible, this does not mean that blackjack, roulette, money wheel, and craps should not be able to multiplayer. It’s worked well enough for casino games on previous systems, so why not now? Some of the best times I’ve had on a casino title were hanging with my brother in New York City, playing roulette all night long and surviving on double-shot espresso’s from Starbucks. Hooking up four players would have certainly kicked up the score on this title a notch or two.
The graphics, as you can imagine were nothing to write home about. As I mentioned before, there are no explosions, just cards. You get a bird’s eye view of the action each and every time. These horrible camera angles make it easier for the developer to hide the fact that creating real casino environments would have taken more time and effort to render. Instead, you get the same old table, with the same old ratty blue design carpet each and every time. This simply goes hand and hand with the barebones presentation.
There are quick tutorials in the instruction manual and tips while the game is on of how to play each variation, or at least to get the hang of each of them. Placing bets are honestly no difficult task. The controls are pretty straightforward.
You’d figure that with the absence of background music in this title that Leaping Lizard games would have thrown us a bone and added Custom Soundtracks into the mix. Well, think again. All that you get are snippets of sound bytes and a hint of crowd ambience. This is not my idea of a casino experience. At least if I were cranking up some of my own tunes, it wouldn’t have seemed so deathly quiet.
So after boasting about not losing real money in this game, I found that I was actually down $30 for purchasing this title; that was a gamble on its own I guess. It’s a risk I take as a gamer. If it played Dead or Alive Volleyball with the casino feature, maybe I would have been partly satisfied. After all, those nude DOA girls jack up the replay value a bit. All in all, I found myself pretty disappointed with this purchase. The lack of offline multiplayer and minute fun factor really steered this game from any characteristic of a satisfying purchase. I can’t in good conscious as a gamer recommend this title to anyone, unless you are truly desperate about playing Texas Hold ‘em and honestly have no real friends to play with. That being said, I should also state that Bicycle Casino is NOT your friend.
