Poker At The Inventory Series: Gambling Isn't That Bad

Man, what a sad state of affairs. Tellatale Games has collapsed from their sheer incompetence and inability to do treat their workers properly and while people are mourning the loss of the final season of “The Walking Dead”, I’m going to talk about how I am going to miss the Poker Night series by Tellatale. That’s right, they could do more then push licensed narratives which are thinly veiled as games for the masses but in this case, they just took their existing licences and put them into a poker game. To its credit, the series is quite fun with a lot of character to go around and it’s a series that I keep going back to when I’m waiting for friends to play League with and I’m not in the mood for Ubermosh and while I’m not one for actual gambling, I do love playing card games with Poker being my fourth favourite type of card game with Cardfight Vanguard at third, Bullshit at second (because no one can outbluff me) and YuGiOh at first obviously but enough about my love for card games. Let’s talk about this somewhat acceptable form of gambling.

Poker Night is simple. Your goal is to win a standard game of Texas hold’em poker against four other players and the rounds keep going until someone wins the whole pot brought which is $50K in the first game and $100K in the second one. Each player starts the game with $10K ($20K in the second game) and normal poker rules apply. So what makes the game different? Well to begin with, this is strictly a single player game so there is no online competent and also, you are vsing other video game characters. Like in the first game, we have The Heavy, Strong Bad, Tychro and Max from “Sam and Max” while the manager is your dealer and for the second game, they bring in Samson from (I think) Venture Bros, Ash of Evil Dead fame, Sam (with Max) and Claptrap from Borderlands and if you don’t think that’s a good line up, you have Moxxi serving you drinks and Glados is your dealer. For me, these guys is what makes Poker Night fun. Without them, this would just be a very boring poker simulator but their presence in the series is what makes it different and they do have some good character chemistry.

Seeing these guys just acting like buddies while playing poker and being extremely meta about how the player is the silent type is fun to see. Each of these characters act like you would expect them and you actually can learn more about them from their character interactions even if you have no prior knowledge of their franchise. For example, I don’t even know who Tychro was but by the end of my experience with Poker Night, I know that he is intelligent, into some weird shit and just has the right amount of smugness to make me wanna punch him in the face. What also makes these characters enjoyable are the fact that they are constantly talking and having conversations about their franchises and their life outside of those franchises which makes it enjoyable if you are a fan of these characters and if you are not, it’s still very funny to watch, even if you can’t get all the references and their characters also extend into how they play in game.

Mechanically, the game is pretty much your standard two card poker game (unless you are playing Okoma, you weirdo) so there isn’t much to talk about but the characters is what makes it different. You see, each character behaves different in game and have tells in a way. So in Poker, a tell is usually some form of body language that can tell a player what another player is thinking such as if they are bluffing or they got a bad hand. Tellatale did add this to the series and they are very easy to spot since you can just go off of facial animations alone but if you are inept at telling different facial expressions, you can also go off by their personality since all the characters play like their own personality. For example, Sam is a detective with a smart ass attitude so you can expect him to be smart about his decisions and often play safe while someone like The Heavy is a dumbass who often gets frustrated so you can often tell when he got a good or bad hand and how he will often go with big raises when he does open the god hand. If you are observant, it becomes easy to cheese most of these matches by just either passing or bluffing because it becomes easy to do so but there is one thing that can ruin this and that’s chance.

Alright, I’m going to start with the complain train now but if you want me to talk about the graphics, they are fine. I do like how they tried to keep the same look the characters had from their original games for this series which does lead to some clashing styles but it’s not that much of a complaint. What I really want to talk about is how it feels rigged at times and I can promise you, it probably isn’t rigged but it doesn’t stop you from feeling like it is. This is more of an inherent thing because it’s natural to think something that being computer simulated is probably rigged and I swear it isn’t but it feels like it. Like, I recall getting a Straight Flush and somehow I lost some bull crap where everyone else pulled a royal flush out of their ass and this happened twice so far across my time spent with the series. It really does feel like it’s rigged at times and having that lurking behind you while you are playing the game isn’t good, especially when you are on a losing streak. What also doesn’t help is the fact is this is a gambling game and how am I supposed to recommend a gambling game? You either like or don’t like gambling and if you don’t, I can’t really recommend this game because it doesn’t offer that much outside of the gambling part when it comes to gameplay. If you really like some of the characters, I guess I could get away with recommending it then but you still need to play Poker in order to get these conversations which involve the characters and you might as well just google them at that point.

Recommending this is hard but I personally give it a 6/10. For five bucks on Steam, you are getting a good poker game with very interesting characters for a really cheap price and yes, it is five bucks on steam for both versions so next time you have spare change on your account, consider buying one of the two (after you buy all the editions of UBERMOSH that is). I personally recommend Two over One mainly because I enjoy those characters more and there is some more customisation options there plus if you play Borderlands 2, you can get some freebies for that and TF2. I’m also very sorry for disappearing again but usual excuse about finding job and blah blah blah. Also, I’m on holiday as I edit this so hopefully by the time I get back, I should have enough reviews to keep the blog going and leave me time to find a job. Next week is also a bit in the air but I’m considering doing a retrospective on League Of Legends maybe or maybe I will do a proper anime review, none of that brief mentioning here. As per usual, my channel is in the sidebar if you want to see me make and play crap YuGiOh decks and my steam profile if you want to be nice and send me games to review because I’m jobless and I don’t want to torrent games to review because pirating is wrong, everyone unless you are an actual pirate and if so, keep at it. Alestorm will probably sing about your exploits one day.