High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition (PS3)

When Sony threatened to close the PlayStation Network’s digital storefronts for PS3, PSP, and Vita games, many started scrambling to grab what they could before the chance would slip away. Some focused solely on grabbing games that are better deals if bought digitally, others focused simply on snagging the best games before they go away, but even though Sony reversed this closure for all but the PSP storefront, the harsh truth is there are games that will some day no longer be available for purchase after Sony shuts down the means of buying them. Making a complete list of such games is difficult, I attempted to create my own as have a few other sites and it seems everyone disagreed on what would have truly been going away permanently had the PS3 store actually been closed. However, you can always expect to see High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition on these lists, and for many, it might not seem like a big loss. It is, by all appearances, a pretty typical poker video game, and even though I will describe it in depth here, I won’t be disavowing you of that fairly accurate assumption. However, this culmination of ideas, this creation born from the hard work of programmers, this shared experience players have all had, doesn’t deserve to be forgotten, and as such I will do what I can to help it leave its mark.

High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition focuses mostly on one style of card game: No-limit Texas Hold’em Poker. This particular variation of the card game involves every player at the table receiving two cards only they can see and that only contribute to their particular set of card combinations. The neutral dealer will first flip three cards known as the river, and essentially every player now has a hand of five: their two unique cards and the three shared cards on the table. The dealer will flip over more cards when it is their turn, and the players are free to make the best combination of their own cards and the cards in the river in order to win the hand. Winning combinations can be as simple as having two of the same card, having a sequence of cards known as a straight, or having five cards of the same suit to make a flush, and depending on the difficulty of acquiring it, these hands are weighted differently to determine who wins the hand. If no one has any special card match-ups or sequences in play though, the player with the highest valued card wins the hand instead.

One reason this rule set became one of the most popular forms of poker no doubt comes from the fact that it can be played fairly quickly but still with a lot of strategy. Players put in an amount of in-game cash to play a hand, players able to fold if they don’t want to risk the money or raise the bet and force others to add in the same amount of cash if they wish to keep playing. Since every player has confidential info they are incentivized to play differently, trying to get more cash out of a good hand but never quite sure what the other players at the table might be holding themselves. Texas Hold’em’s two card hand makes that missing information meaningful but still reasonable to guess at, and gauging how good a player’s position in the round is by how they’re betting or behaving is key to getting the most money out of them or avoiding a big loss yourself.

When High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition had an active online community it likely recreated the behavior judging aspect of real poker fairly well, although having things like microphone or camera use be optional meant players could withhold vital details that would other otherwise perhaps reveal they are bluffing or trying to play coy. Even against the game’s AI opponents though you can still draw out some of that psychological angle of poker. While it can be hard to get a read on some of them and others might not have much of a strategy or personality at all, I was able to encounter some computer players with distinct strategies or focuses. One AI player early in a tournament liked to do big brash bets to scare people away from matching them, but his actual cards weren’t always that good and it lead to him being eliminated when I called his bluff. On the other hand, my main rival for the entire Amateur tournament was a lady player named Kayla who played with surprising intelligence, knowing when to press her advantage and thus able to scare you off from meeting her bigger bets because she never seemed to overinvest in a bad hand. The AI players do have animations and voice lines to make the table seem more lively, but these rarely felt like tells and tended to slow the game down considerably if you did let them play out. Luckily, there is a fast forward option available to speed through the turns of computer players, a particularly fortunate feature considering good Texas Hold’em play usually involves folding at the start of almost half of your rounds to avoid pointless losses.

The fast forward feature and competent computer players makes the tournament modes fairly enjoyable to play. After creating your own custom poker player, you are able to start a career where the goal is to win three different levels of play: Amateur Season, Pro Season, and Champion Season. The first two both offer a free tournament just to practice within the format and a tournament you pay a little cash to enter to potentially earn free admittance to the more expensive to enter true tournament, but you are given a decent amount of starting money and can win more by placing highly enough in these tournaments. The premise of these tournaments (save the Champion Season) is that you and 99 computer players will all be playing poker simultaneously, your table never having more than 6 players but some players will rotate in or out based on the rate of eliminations. You do not need to win each tournament you participate in, but the higher you place, the more winnings you get and the better your overall season ranking becomes. So long as you’re in the top six after playing all the tournaments that make up that season, you get to make it to a champion’s game with five other top players. Beating that match in Amateur lets you reach Pro and Pro’s champion match puts you in Champion Season. Champion Season is basically just that champion match format but with the best players and no need to worry about earning your way in.

Having the tournaments allow for weaker performances without dooming your chances of winning overall is a nice way to ensure the player isn’t discouraged from playing by a game that often involves plenty of luck, but by knowing what hands have potential and goading your opponents right it is still a game with a fair bit of skill. Strangely enough though, the game’s save system can easily undermine a lot of the danger in these tournaments. Even if you perform so poorly you get no winnings, so long as you don’t save you can just reload and retry the tournament. This can make audacious and mindless play benefit a player so long as it is early in a tournament round, those cash reserves by playing with no strategy besides betting everything and draining the coffers of reasonable AI players a bit too easily earned. The no limits rule does mean the betting can be incredibly dramatic when the stakes are high, but it also allows for brazenly bad play to prosper if you have no issue utilizing the save files to your advantage. You will at least need some strategy to stay in the game once the numbers thin out a bit, but the cushion for a failure might be a little too comfortable considering this game has the words “High Stakes” in the title.

Even after you’ve worked your way through the tournaments, you can always play some quick poker with customizable rules. Here No-limit Texas Hold’em isn’t your only option for how to play poker, the player able to set bet limits to prevent any of the more flagrant bluffs or mindless tactics from taking root. There are also different rule sets available, such as Super Hold’em, Tahoe, Billabong, and Shangai. These are all fairly similar to each other but differ from Texas Hold’em in the key way that players are dealt three cards each, and while the exact details of how this impacts play changes based on other rule changes like how the rounds unfold or how the river is handled, that three card hand is the biggest shift in how you approach strategy. Three cards means it is far harder to predict what is in the opposition’s hand and the river’s contributions aren’t as necessary to success for an individual player, so the mind games can both be more intense but also tend to rely on less concrete information or reasonable assumptions. Shanghai at least has the interesting touch of every player revealing one of the three cards they were dealt to allow for more strategic betting, but mostly the customization options are there to add some extra options to an otherwise fairly straightforward poker adaptation.

Speaking of the straightforwardness of the adaptation, High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition is a rather no frills affair when it comes to its presentation. There are only two venues the game can be played in, one a fairly nice but unambitious casino setting and the other a fancy penthouse. Similarly, character models, even your custom character, have a very small pool of features to pull from, leading to generic looking characters throughout. They also aren’t exactly modeled the best, often looking rather plain and further making parsing if they have any tells more difficult due to their basic set of animation options. Vital information is always conveyed quite clearly with on screen details, card info, and even a box explaining the controls, although it does seem to trip up sometimes and fail to display a bet, especially if you were fast forwarding to the next action you can take. Save for that rare small slip up though, High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition provides a competent poker sim but tries very little to make that more appealing or visually interesting.

THE VERDICT: If all you are looking for is a way to play Texas Hold’em poker on your PS3, High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition does a perfectly adequate job of providing that. It displays all of the information important to play quite well even if the rest of the presentation does little to excite, and the tournament modes do feature AI opponents who can put up a good fight and even exhibit personalities that influence the games. It is fairly easy to use save files to get around your bad performances though, and the customization options and other rules are locked only to quick play rather than the tournaments getting ambitious with their design. Thankfully you’ll still find plenty of what makes poker inherently exciting here. The tense mind games and strategic play are present and properly rewarded, but it does feel like the stakes can sometimes be ironically low in addition to the game mostly just adding a bit of structure to an otherwise straightforward poker sim.

And so, I give High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition for PlayStation 3…

An OKAY rating. There’s no razzle dazzle to be found in this casino game’s presentation, but High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition has all the essentials required to be a serviceable poker sim with its only big stumbling point being that the save system makes cheap tactics a bit too easy to pull off. Mixing and matching rules for tournaments or adding some more life to them would definitely help this feel more varied and engaging. The player’s cash could have used some closer monitoring too to get around how easy it is to start a tournament and quit scot-free if you don’t like the looks of it. The game has the typical poker aspect of requiring a blind bet from certain players from each round so you can’t sit out every hand and hoard your cash, but something more like saving after you enter the tournament to register the payment might help make brazen tactics a bit more risky to employ. Having a way to invalidate a poor performance isn’t bad per se, especially since losing a tournament just means you will be playing it again to try and win if you did, but going All-In with a bet should always feel weighty whether it’s the first turn of a tournament or the final face-off. Structuring a few challenges or tournaments around the other poker rule sets could also help to avoid the fatigue of constant Texas Hold’em play, but mostly the game just provides a fine way to play this popular card game while not quite being able to achieve the valuable personal side of it since most AI opponents come and go so quickly or are generally simplistic players outside of the rare memorable character.

So after all of this I essentially confirmed that High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition is just a decent virtual approximation of poker, something many people probably assumed the moment they learned the game even exists. It isn’t exceptional or ambitious, and sometimes that benefits it because it means it achieves its simple goal of being virtual poker with no real money involved and a few different ways to play. However, while some certainly won’t miss a competent poker video game the day it is actually delisted from the PlayStation Store, it still doesn’t deserve being handed such a fate. People have memories tied up in this game, this game represents a specific point in history for the medium and could be referenced for concepts like viewing the evolution of video game poker, and it can serve as a simple reference point for others interested in making a poker video game so they can see what works and what can be improved upon.

The issue isn’t that many will miss out on this game if it goes away, but what it going away represents. We can never truly know how important a piece of art might be some day no matter how seemingly mundane or basic it is now, and if we start deeming certain works expendable simply because they’re unambitious, we are still tossing away a piece of the medium. It may be High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition in this hypothetical, but there are other games that never had their chance to shine that will disappear, and it’s easy to dismiss the fall of the unassuming games up until it’s one you wanted to play that goes away. Tying such a thesis statement to this review might mean many people never read it since the game being focused on isn’t that appealing, but this is the very sort of game I will defend vehemently because making judgment calls based on whether a game’s concept or quality make them worthy of preservation can lead to us missing out on all kinds of creative or unique experiences simply because we didn’t fight when it was a game like High Stakes on the Vegas Strip: Poker Edition on the line.