Posted tagged ‘Microsoft’

Early Hours with Microsoft’s Full House Poker

March 17, 2011

I pulled the trigger and bought Full House Poker, Microsoft’s new Avatar centric poker game. They will be tying weekly tournaments with prizes to it beginning this weekend, and the pacing for single player is not as horrific as I expected it to be. However, right now, there is no multiplayer games going on and the single player games feel one dimensional after a few plays.

I am trying to figure out if it was worth 800 MP Points. Early hours never work for evaluating a game that has a multiplayer component because most sane people sleep at night…

I like the outfits and the little extras you unlock when you level up, but the little gimmicky things are irritating. I do not want to learn how to do poker tricks, and I could give a rat’s ass about what color the table and chairs are.

In addition, there are two things that bug me a lot. For one, it is a general rule that if you fold a hand you do not show it, and if your opponent folds a hand you don’t show them what you have. It is poker 101, but this game gives you that option for some reason. Maybe it is a tool to mess with the other player..

Maybe you would show them the Ace in your hands and say something like “it’s a good thing you folded bucko, or you’d be eatin’ your mom’s keister for Easter.

The other thing that bugs me is that I can speed everything up in single-player except the animation at the end of each hand. These are gratuitous and unnecessary. If you could turn this shit off, the pacing would be perfect.

Admittedly, I am a poor poker player, but I love to play anyway, and Full House Poker is better than Zynga’s Facebook stuff at least. At least Full House Poker doesn’t constantly nag me about sending one of my friends some free poker chips.. although Microsoft’s game does nag you constantly about its upcoming events. It happens so often it feels like an advertisement… in a game you paid for. I hope they cut the frequency of that down dramatically.

I will talk more about the game in the days ahead. Caveats aside, I am having fun with it. A demo is available if you want to try it out too, so do not take my word for it – try it for yourselves..

Getting Dis-Kinect-ed

March 3, 2011

After a long wait, I finally replaced my Xbox 360 with a shiny next Xbox 360 Kinect bundle (250 GB HDD). I paid a fair amount of money for it. What I found deplorable was what was in the box – or rather – what was not included in the box. When someone pays a large amount of money for the higher end bundle, Microsoft should have the common decency to include  some important extras. For one, it came with a cheesy vanilla A/V hook-up instead of an HDMI cable, and the controller came with regular batteries instead of a rechargeable battery and no charger chord.

Really Microsoft? Do these items cost so much that you cannot afford to give consumers these in the PREMIUM bundle? Does a rechargeable battery and a USB charging cable cost that much that you have to soak me for a small amount of additional cash?

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