Even more flawed than the last effort!

User Rating: 2.8 | World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer - All In PS2
I really wanted this game to be good. I bought the previous game in this series. ' World Championship Poker 2 featuring Howard Lederer'. As most people who played it discovered, the game would freeze up late in tournaments in Career Mode. That became a very aggravating way to build a career, having the game save your every loss, but freeze up before you could cash in. When it played, the game itself played OK, but the freezeups denied the player the possibility of Victory. And whatever you call it, it's not a game if you cannot win. For that reason alone the last effort was a failure. Everything else about the game was at least acceptable if it wasn't outstanding. So when "World Championship Poker: All-In" came out, that ONE thing was all they really had to fix to make the game work. Just take out the bugs that freeze the tournaments. Easy, huh? Guess again. I am stupefied that they would release yet another game that consistently freezes up during tournaments. That was the ONLY thing they had to fix from WCP2 and they didn't fix it. Not only does this game have freeze-ups, but there are a couple of other quirks that make this game worse than the last effort.

First of all, the repeating hands...
Drew's draw was the game. I saw exactly queens and sixes beat exactly queens and twos four times in 45 minutes. When I got 6 6 A J 9, I learned to throw the A J and keep the 9 because I knew the draw cards would be 9 9. The cards in my hand were in the same order, and the cards I then drew were coming out the same. It was obvious that this game was not generating random hands, but rather cycling through a certain number of pre-arranged hands... over and over again. That's not close to what poker is.

Second, the game consistently freezes up on me. It will sometimes reseat a table and leave empty the seat that should be occupied by you, or sometimes the game just fizzle and stop with the announcer repeating the winning hand over and over again until you reset the game. Again, victory seems to be very hard to come by.

Third, the game has a VERY annoying sound effect. Frequently, a losing player will pantomime shooting himself or herself in the head and the game gives off a loud BANG! as though a real gun were going off. Seeing someone simulate suicide once is irritating. Having to see it and hear it over and over again is disturbing. The BANG! is not even synched up with the video. Very weird. The improved variety of card games and locations, and any other improvements they have made in this release are overshadowed by the two glaring flaws in the gameplay. This effort is an embarassment.