World Championship Poker 2 for PSP Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Though you might have played the original WCP on the PS2 or Xbox and might look forward to World Championship Poker 2 for more of the same, you'll be a little disappointed. That's not to say that it's an entirely bad game, as it's actually a reasonable poker experience, but as the development teams switched between games, basically the only similarities between the two games are name and the card games they're based on. On the other hand, if you're a fan of the console version of WCP2 and are looking for a portable version of the sequel, the PSP variant will do you fairly well.



If you haven't played the console version but have read our

review, you basically know what's in store for you here. The game's presentation closely follows that of both the various poker television shows on-air these days as well as most any other poker game on the market. That is to say that it's clean and fairly intuitive, but it's nothing you haven't seen before.



WCP2's Career mode, however, is wholly unique. Rather than seeing a simple list of games or tournaments available for any given week, you're presented with an overhead map of the world. Scrolling about will show you various international locations for games, though most of the time only a few are playable at once. Part of the problem here is that the available games are somewhat random and may not be to your liking, so even if all you want to do is play No Limit Hold 'em, you may not have that option. You'll have to sit in on games of Razz and such from time to time just to pass the week by, and it's likely that you won't be happy with every game out there. So while the Career mode has somewhat of a cool look to it, in practice it doesn't allow for the sort of customized career play that you can get from most any other poker game.



One thing that is pretty cool with the Career mode however is that there are some light RPG elements involved. Your character has a set of skills that weigh in on your ability to read a hand or stay straight-faced, though luckily they don't actually impact your ability to hit cards or anything of that sort. Hand Strength, for example, will show you things like your likelihood to win and hit as well as your current pot odds. Most of the other skills, like Stare Down, Stone Face and Tough Read, all apply to WCP2's mini-game.



This mini-game is WCP2's most unique feature. The idea here is that if you make a risky or unusual play of some fashion, like a bluff, you're given a quick mini-game that decides whether you give up a tell or not. A circular dial with a notch will appear in the corner of the screen, and you need to keep your little "divot" icon in the recessed area. Keep it there for the required period of time and you'll play the hand with a straight face. Miss it and your character will wind up giving some sort of tell.



This is an interesting system but it isn't quite refined. For one thing, you'll be forced to play the game at seemingly odd times. Sometimes the computer will think you have a strong or weak hand when you might not think so, and you'll be forced to play this game. While there are obvious cases when it should appear, there are not-so-obvious, or even correct, cases when it does.



Additionally, and this may actually be in its favor depending on how it would have played out had it been tweaked differently, there are times when the computer won't really react to an obvious tell. There were many times where I made a big raise with a piss-poor hand, failed the mini-game and then made a bad tell. More often than not, the rest of the table would wind up folding to me.



Other than this misstep, the game's AI does work reasonably well. It'll make better calls than most other games on the market, like not having a problem folding, for instance. It'll also bluff, play odds and make defensive bets to protect its hand. While it isn't perfect, it is rather good.





One last bit of interest here is with regards to the game's online play. The PSP version of World Championship Poker 2 works via Infrastructure play and is compatible with the PlayStation 2 version of the game, meaning that you can jump into games containing both PS2 and PSP users. You don't have the EyeToy or voice support, but at least you can hop into these games.



Getting into them can be somewhat of a pain, however, depending on how you choose to find a game. Picking the Quick Match option will find you a game fairly easily, but the main lobby needs some work. One problem is that some games will have a minimum buy-in amount, but you can't easily see that from the listing. Picking one of these games will give you an error and then send you back to the main online menu. If you try checking out the lobby again, the games are often listed in a different order, making it very difficult to remember which games you've tried.



While the console versions of the game weren't perfect in the presentation department, the PSP version lags behind them a bit. Firstly, it has the same rather bare-bones character creator, which, in the world of poker videogames, is pretty disappointing. You can choose different skin types, clothes, hair and such, but you can't actually modify your birth-given physical attributes much. Visually, the PSP version is quite lackluster as well. Up close, player textures are a blocky mess of pixels, resembling poor SNES Mode 7 use than anything else. The frame rate also stumbles quite a bit here and there and is generally a bit choppy. Lastly, lengthy load times leading into games can slow down the pace quite a bit, especially if you've just busted out and want to immediately make back some cash.

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