World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer (All In, Xbox 360)

Between the cheap and easy Texas Hold 'em for the Xbox Live Arcade and Activision's latest World Series of Poker game, there are a sufficient number of ways to get your poker on via the Xbox 360. Now you can add Crave's World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer - All In to the mix, though it's easily the weakest poker game available for the system. The computer-controlled players aren't terrible, but they're just as prone to ill-advised plays as any game out there, and some of the poker variations available suffer from bizarre hand repetition, which is a baffling problem.

The game's progression follows the same pattern as last year's World Championship Poker 2 for the Xbox. In the career mode, you begin by creating a character from a wacky set of available appearance options and then find yourself on a map, complete with several marked casinos and other seedy gambling locations where you can jump into a game. You start with $1,000 and a dream, and each week you get to choose from several games to play in. The one nice feature All In does offer is a wide variety of poker variations, from Texas hold 'em to Omaha, five-card draw, seven-card stud, razz, and HORSE. As you progress, you can earn skill points to give you specific advantages while playing in a game, as well as upgrade your house, which is a hub area for you to check out from time to time.

The career mode is novel enough in concept, but it's sunk by the same problems last year's career mode suffered from. Specifically, there are way too many limit games that can literally take hours to get through. You do get to choose from multiple games each week, but there are weeks where there are next to no games available from the traditional hold 'em or Omaha ilk. There isn't much that's more infuriating and dull than playing a hi-low limit Omaha game against six computer opponents. The game does now include a turbo mode that skips through a lot of the chaff, but this mode moves so fast that it's nigh-on impossible to keep proper track of the action on the table.

A new problem is that some of the games on the roster are straight-up broken. How, you ask, do you break poker? Well, for one, don't randomly generate hands; instead, put them on some kind of weird algorithm that makes the same hands come up over and over again. This isn't so much an issue with games like hold 'em and Omaha, but while playing five-card draw, we ran into the same starting hands and the exact same draws time and time again. Less often did we notice this while playing seven-card stud, but we did run into at least a few hands that felt exceedingly familiar.

Apart from these weird bouts of hand repetition, the artificial intelligence in All In isn't quite up to snuff. The one improvement the developers seem to have made this year is that computer players will occasionally try to trap you. They'll check raise to try and lure you in with a big hand from time to time and can occasionally fool you while doing so. The trouble is that even with these occasional, unpredictable traps, the AI is still frequently crazy with its calls and raises. AI players will check through a made straight on the river, even if there's no feasible hand that can beat them on the table. Likewise, other players will bet like crazy on small pairs, even when there are pairs and possible straight and flush draws on the board. On the other side of the coin, limit games are completely predictable. One player will always raise before the flop, and nearly every time, at least one player will stick with it through to the very last card, regardless of hand strength. There are a few distinct personality types you might be able to discern while playing, but all of them make the same bizarre calls and raises, regardless of personality.

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