This game BLOWS!!

I am a big poker fan. My friends and I have a poker night weekly, I watch poker on TV, and love playing poker games. Before I played World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer "All In" I believed that any poker game would be at least pretty decent, at least playable. Then, I started up WCP.

From the start I didn't have a good feeling about this game. The menus just gave me a bad feel. It is too cartoony for my taste and they aren't very direct. There is not very much in terms of content here. Besides Xbox live, which I couldn't access because of Network Problems, you can choose from Quick Play, Career, or Scenario Mode.

In Quick Play, you choose your game, set the limits and have the ability to play as a pro. Nothing special here.

In Career Mode, you can create a character and play tournaments and private games over the course of a year. As far as character customization goes, this is a bare bones setup. There are a few different outfits, voices, etc. to choose from but there is nothing special here either.

In Scenario Mode, you use your character to play in nine different scenario games. Nine scenarios is not a lot for a poker game and these are my favorite part of poker games. The one benefit, if you can call it that, is that you can unlock otherwise unattainable items.

There is also a "pad" that you can create for your character. This pad is what other players see when you host an online game. There are a total of six pads and you can buy items. Wanna venture a guess as to where you can buy these items? A pawn shop. Not a store, a pawn shop. So that is very believable, a poker millionaire shops at a pawn shop for all of their home furnishing. I don't know what the creators were on when they made this game.

My big problem with the gameplay is that there is a Bluff-Tell mini game. There is no way to turn this off and if you don't play it you automatically present a tell, or a sign of your hand's strength. In the whole two hours that I could stand this game long enough to actually play, I couldn't figure this mini game out.

Like I mentioned before, I couldn't play online but I can give you the specs on the box. It claims support for up to sixteen players on Xbox Live. The game is supposed to support voice and Xbox Live Vision. It also has online leaderboards.

The graphics are passable but not very good and the sounds in the game get annoying after a few minutes.

Please don't waste your money on this title. There are much better poker games on the market.