Texas Cheat 'Em

May 21,2009 - The Texas Hold ‘Em craze over the past few years has inspired quite a few games, but all of them were serious attempts at simulating the game that probably bored anyone that wasn’t enthralled by any of those games. Wideload Shorts has decided to take the classic poker game and turn it upside by encouraging cheating and making it the key to your success in Texas Cheat ‘Em for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.



Building on the expected Texas Hold ‘Em gameplay, Texas Cheat ‘Em adds about 15 power-ups that offer different means of cheating to get the advantage over your opponents with the cheat points you earn each turn. These power-ups include things like X-ray vision to see one opponent’s cards, the ability steal chips from another player, abilities to change the cards in your hand or in the community, and others that can be used for a variety of ways to make the community work best for you. All of these power-ups result in you having to play a quick minigame to determine your success, which includes a variety of simple games that you play alone or against an opponent depending on who the target of the power-up is.

With all of these different power-ups in Texas Cheat ‘Em being used by you and you’re your opponents, the showdown shows just how weird the results can end up. You will probably see multiple players ending up with four of a kind with the same numbered cards, so you do have to stay ahead of the pack to figure out what you might have n the works if you use the precognition cheat to see the community cards beforehand. It seemed like there may be multiple ways to make things fall your way, depending on your skills and whether you play best as an offensive or defensive player. We were able to find a good set of power-ups that guaranteed us a win even if it was not the quickest way to victory, which was the result of stealing from another player, precognition, and then changing the cards in our hand if a flush or four of a kind is likely.

You will want to look through the tutorial and career mode to get a handle on how Texas Cheat ‘Em works and to figure out what works best for you before heading online. The career mode is actually a bit like Punch-Out, in that you have four circuits with four challenges each that range from beating one player to having more money than everyone else after a few hands to gaining a set amount of money. That is as far as you can go for single-player content, besides just the basic practice mode, though that may be all you should really buy it for with the way multiplayer has turned out. It’s a shame that there is no local multiplayer since the point of the game is to cheat anyway, so seeing each other’s hands doesn’t seem like it would ruin that option.

It’s always a shame when games that rely on online multiplayer for the true replay value don’t sell well, which seems to be where Texas Cheat ‘Em is after the first week after release. The multiplayer is really where any kind of poker game earns most of its value and when it doesn’t sell, it loses its main reason for people to buy it, which is an ironic conundrum to be in. In the peak afternoon hours, maybe one or two games were available to join while attempts during the evening required a few tries at matchmaking before a game was found for us to join, so there is pretty much slim pickings right off the bat that will just get worse over time. The other issue is really who you’re playing with since good friends that play as fairly as the game intends is the best way to play versus those that are intent on just playing to win by any means possible.



Texas Cheat ‘Em is not exactly going to provide cutting edge graphics since it is just a poker game. The heads-up display is fairly simple with an overhead view of the table in the middle, the cheat power-ups part of the display to the right where the mini-games also occur, and a handy gauge that shows the rankings for best hands. Though your avatar is used for single-player and multiplayer, your opponents in single-player are just portraits of the stereotypes that you face. There isn’t really any music in Texas Cheat ‘Em at all, so you either have to listen to the decent sound effects or put your own music on.

Texas Cheat ‘Em does a good job of offering a novel twist on the typical poker formula but suffers from a lack of players to make this is worthy purchase for the added value of multiplayer. Unless you have a good group of friends that are up for purchasing the game together, it’s not worth it to buy this game to play with the few games that appear online throughout the day.

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