Hoyle Casino Series for Mac, Windows

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

I found out about this game from a friend. He was playing Texas Hold ‘Em and I was complaining that he folded too easily. I decided to give it a try. Each player can make their own profile. There’s a face maker you can use to make a picture that resembles you or you can use one of several pictures that the computer already has. The face maker also has the ability to randomly generate faces, but these tend to be bizarre. Since I wasn’t planning on using my friend’s computer forever, I just used one of the faces the computer had.

The computer set me up with $5,000 in credit so that I could play any of the games in the casino. (Hoyle Casino 2004 is more than just Texas Hold ‘Em, but I’ll get to that later.) I was able to try the Texas Hold ‘Em and show him how I played it. I ended up losing a little money, but as I said, I wasn’t playing for keeps so it didn’t really matter. It’s not like it was real money anyway.

I tried a few of the other games and decided to get this game for myself. I didn’t really bother with the face maker. It was way too complicated and I didn’t like any of the random faces. I found a face that sort of kind of looked similar to me and used that. For a while, I stuck to roulette and Texas Hold ‘Em because those were the two games that I was most familiar with. I occasionally tried the slots, but didn’t do to well. I went back to Texas Hold ‘Em. Eventually, I decided to try some of the other games. There are a lot of different forms of poker in Hoyle Casino 2004 as well as a lot of different slot machines and other games. There’s keno, craps, black jack, Baccarat, and many other games that I hadn’t heard of before. It even has horse racing.

Most people that I know that have a game like this seem to stick to one or two games. (My friend and I aren’t exceptions.) If you’re get bored easily, but don’t really want to bother learning the rules to a new game, Hoyle Casino 2004 has a tutorial for each game. What you take away from this depends on how easily you learn. The instructions may not always be clear, especially for a game you’ve never even heard of before. Keno and craps were totally alien to me and thus difficult to really understand. I know how to bet and everything, but I still don’t understand how craps really works.

If you get bored of just playing poker game after poker game and want more of a challenge, you can play tournaments. Most of the poker games have tournaments that last several rounds. You and several competitors play 14 hands. The three best move on to play 28 hands. From there, two advance to play as many hands as are necessary for there to be one person left. If you think that the poker tournaments are too long, then you’re in luck. You do have the option to save the tournament whenever a dialogue box comes up. Just leave the game and it’s automatically saved. Most of the other games have tournaments. Roulette is set up with one round and isn’t really as satisfying or challenging as the Texas Hold ‘Em tournament is.

If and when you do decide to leave, you get shown an advertisement for other games. It’s brief, but annoying. I find it to be kind of cheap. I think it’s a lot better to integrate the ads into the game so that they’re not as noticeable.

Ultimately, I find myself usually going back to Roulette or Texas Hold ‘Em. This isn’t to say that the program is bad. I think it could be enjoyable for just about anyone who likes to play, but doesn’t like having to constantly drop money on gambling.

I’d give this four stars.

Freecell

It’s odd that Epinions would have Freecell available for review. It’s not like you really have much of a choice in acquiring this product. Either you get it or you don’t. Freecell usually comes with the more recent versions of Windows. (Older versions have the generic solitaire.) A lot of people either don’t know that Freecell is there or don’t really play the game that much.

For those that have never seen Freecell, some of the solitaire rules apply, but others don’t. For instance, all 52 cards are dealt out in eight columns. The first four columns have seven cards each and the remaining four have six each. Above the eight columns are eight spaces. The four on the left are your free cells, which is where the game gets its name. On the right are the four spaces where all of the cards are supposed to eventually end up. (I’ll go into greater detail later.)

The 52 cards are laid out randomly. The rules for moving them are like the solitaire you may be used to. If you want to move a card, you start with the bottom card. It can be moved to any card that’s one higher and of the opposite color. (Jack is like eleven, the queen is equivalent to twelve and the king is played as thirteen.) The two of hearts can either be moved to the three of clubs or the three of spades. The ten of spades can be put on either the jack of hearts or the jack of diamonds. If a column is empty, you can put any card there. If you need to get at a card, you can use the free cells to hold cards. (Each cell can hold only one at a time.) If you have an alternating series, you can move any part of the series that you have space for. That’s where the free cells come in. To move a series like that, you are theoretically moving one card at a time to the free cells and back down again or to free columns. You’re limited by the number of cells and columns you have available. I’d suggest keeping as many free cells open as possible. (If you’re good, you can find ways around this, but you’re still going to need either free cells or empty columns.)

Like the solitaire you may have played as a kid, the object of the game is to get all of the cards to those four spaces on the top right that I mentioned before. You start with the ace of each suit. There’s one space for each suit; the order doesn’t matter. Once an ace is placed in one of these spaces, you move on to the two of the same suit. (The aces are always automatically moved up once they become available. The rest of the cards are moved up once they serve no other purpose.) You can move the two up as soon as the ace is there, although it’s not always a good idea to move cards up as soon as they become available. Once all of the cards are in these four columns, you win. When the game is over, you can be dealt either a random hand or you can choose one by number.

It sounds easy, but it’s not. They say it’s possible to win every hand dealt to you, but it’s more than likely that you’ll lose, and that’s done when there are no possible moves left. There’s no actual scoring, so you either win or you lose. It will take you a while to get the feel of the game. You’ll find that there are certain strategies that work and some that don’t. I’ve found it’s best that you keep at least two of the free cells open at all times and try to keep at least one column open if possible. Also, don’t move a card just for the sake of moving a card. Make sure you know what you’re doing.

The game is very easy to learn and play on the computer. (I don’t know that I’d have the patience to do this with a real deck of cards. Moving the cards would be too difficult.) A big advantage of playing on the computer is that it keeps stats. After 641 games, I’ve one 55% of them. My longest winning streak was 9 games and the longest losing streak was 7. There’s no way to keep separate stats for different people except to clear the stats. (You’d have to write down your stats before someone else clears them.)

This is a great game only because of its simplicity. If you’re looking for a way to waste just a few minutes, play Freecell. You may find that you’ll be wasting several hours.