Super Adventures in Delisted Games Part 4: Race Driver: GRID, Anthem, Poker Night

It's Super Adventures' 15th anniversary today and to celebrate I'm taking a break from Dungeons & Dragons! None of this week's games are an RPG, they don't have dark elves, or clerics, or magic missile spells. One of them had actual missiles I think, but it's not really the same.

This week on Super Adventures, it's been 19 months since Delisted Games Part 3, so it seemed like a good time to get back to whining about games being removed from online stores due to licensing issues. And not just racing games this time! (To be honest, I'm just using this as an excuse to write about some games I probably couldn't get a full length article out of.)

I've found some fun covers here. The first game has Games for Windows on the top, the second has 'DOWNLOAD ONLY' written on it and a bunch of tiny text warning you that a persistent internet connection is required, and the third didn't even get an empty box with a download code in it. As far as I know.

But things aren't as bad as they seem! GRID doesn't have the actual Game for Windows Live DRM on it, that logo only means that the game runs in Windows. Meanwhile, Anthem and Poker Night... actually things really are bad for those two. They're really really bad.

Anyway, the first game is Race Driver: GRID, sponsored by eBay.

---

Developer:

Codemasters

|

Release Date:

2008

|

Systems:

PC, Mac, X360, PS3, DS

---

Outside of Europe and Japan this game is just called GRID, which fits with Codemasters' other racing games DiRT, FUEL and the other GRID from 2019. (Not RACE though, that's a different developer).

I suppose TOCA also fits the pattern, which was a bit of a Gran Turismo-style racing series that began all the way back in 1997. The main TOCA series ended with TOCA: Racer Driver 3 a couple of years earlier, so Race Driver: GRID is either a spiritual successor or a straight up sequel.

Codemasters is actually one of the most successful and respected racing game developers, and one of the longest running. Their first racing game was BMX Simulator back in 1986 and their list of legendary racing series also includes Colin McRae Rally and Micro Machines. Unfortunately they were bought by EA in 2021 and now all they make are F1 games, with a chunk of their employees moved onto EA Sports titles.

That's got nothing to do with why this was delisted, but it does seem to be what ultimately ended the GRID franchise after 5 games.

Right away the game introduces its Xbox 360-era aesthetic, with its slightly sepia-tinted visuals and floating 3D metal text. Everything in the UI is floating 3D actually - the options screen, the race results, the screen where you choose your name... oh I should mention that the helpful voices in your ear call you by your actual name or nickname, which gets kind of creepy at times. Plus it always makes me feel sorry for the voice actors who had to record every single name you can pick from. Though there are a few names missing; you can be "Bozo", or "Sparky", but not "Ray".

There are a few options here and it's not immediately obvious which gets you to the driving. 'GRID World' sounds like an MMO spin-off but it's actually the career mode, where you earn cash and unlock races. 'Race Day' lets you set up your own races, and 'Multiplayer' doesn't do anything any more I guess as the PC version's servers were shut down long before the game was delisted.

Need for Speed: Undercover (PC)

Before I show off GRID, here's another racing game from 2008.

The big titles this year were games like Need for Speed: Undercover and Burnout Paradise, which both featured open worlds. You can drive all around the city and the roads beyond, dodging traffic and being chaotic. Undercover also had a story and cop chases and stuff.

There's no story in GRID though. No open world or cop chases either as it's 100% official legal racing. All the speeding takes place on closed off tracks, with crowds of 3D spectators lining the streets to watch. They even take photos and I'm not surprised considering the game looks like this:

Okay maybe it's hard to appreciate in a blurry static screenshot, and it's a bit fuzzy and brown compared to its gleaming sequel, but if you told me that this was the prettiest racing game of 2008 I'd believe you. Assuming there wasn't a Gran Turismo game released that year.
 
I tried a bit of Gran Turismo 4 to compare and maybe I just picked a bad car, but I really struggled to get it around corners as the bloody thing didn't want to turn. GRID's cars are the opposite, as they handle like a dream. Though you're still sliding straight into that corner barrier unless you slow down first, and you've got to be careful getting back into the race or else your car will just spin in circles. So there is a feeling of realism to its racing, it's just a bit like heightened action movie realism.

The game also features damage, which I found out when I slammed into a corner and instantly wrecked my car. It got me driving cautiously for the next few races, being very careful not to trade paint with other cars in case I ended up trading engine manifolds instead. I think the game was just cheating a bit so it could show me the 'what to do if you mess up' tutorial though, as it turned out you're not actually that fragile.

The game inherited TOCA's damage indicators, they're down on the right next to the speedometer. The more recklessly you drive, the more yellow lights you accumulate, and maybe even some orange ones if you're unfortunate. If you damage your wheels it makes it harder to steer and cracking the radiator makes it more likely your engine will explode, or something like that. None of this you want.

Fortunately the other cars are just as capable of screwing up, taking damage, spinning out, and so on. This shot is from just before the finish line and there's no nitro in the game, so I thought I had zero chance to pull ahead of this guy in this absolute wreck I'm driving... until he lost control and slammed into the barrier. 1st place!

Look, I found night time! They've got their headlights on and everything.

What happened here is that I finished enough events to finish the season, so I got a chance to drive in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race! Which fortunately only lasts 24 minutes. You get the full day-night cycle though and it turns out that 24 minutes is actually a long time to continually focus on a challenge. It wasn't long because I started getting careless on corners.

It doesn't help that the track's a bit more open than most without barriers on all the corners, so it's not always easy to spot the turns. No driving line to point in the right direction here either. There is a helpful minimap however... which is maybe a little too zoomed-in for me. But there is also a helpful warning light underneath to so even if you spot the turn a little late, you know you should be slowing down.

When you start off no one's expecting much from you. You get a choice of three races, you finish one, repeat. The teams you're driving for provide a suitable car for each race and you get paid for just showing up and doing your job, with a little bonus pay for completing objectives like 'come higher than 5th' or 'beat a lap time of X minutes'. But once you earn enough cash to start your own team, career mode really gets going.

Racing for your own team means you get all these boxes of races to choose from, there's about 54 it seems, and finishing first gets you a little golden trophy. I've been playing about seven hours and I've been getting a lot of golds on normal mode with only the occasional retry. Though I only need to look at how many difficulty settings and driving assists there are if I ever get too delusional and need to be reminded that my skills are actually in the mid range of pitiful.

Some of these boxes still have a glass lid on them, which you open by earning the licences for that region. Fortunately there's no Gran Turismo driving tests required. I hate doing them! Instead you just have to earn enough reputation points in races from that region. I did pretty well in the races in the first USA box, so I unlocked the second one.

Unfortunately there are apparently only 15 locations, so even though the tracks have a few variations the scenery gets familiar. There are only 43 cars as well, slightly less than the hundreds you get in GT and Forza. Fewer cars means they could make them more distinct, but it doesn't look like there's much variety.

The catch with driving for your own team is that you have to buy the appropriate car for each track... from eBay. Seriously.

Or you could just get a new one for full price. Though the real benefit of getting a used car isn't to shave a few hundred off the price. If you do the maths and spot the cars which have had an usual amount of wins, you can end up getting a legendary beast with performance maybe 5% better than normal cars! At least that's what I read.

I'm a little surprised about how tiny the pictures are. Some racing games really show off their cars by letting you spin them around in 3D, or open the doors and boot. Some have some narration telling you how the car features a 8 litre quad-turbocharged Volkswagen WR16 and can reach 100 km/h in 2.46 seconds. GRID just tells you it's being sold by Charlie Tyler and has been wrecked 3 times.

Most events seem to be circuit races, so you do a few laps of a track, then a few laps of a very similar track, and continue until it says you're done.

But there are other kinds of events, like touge, where two drivers race point to point on curvy mountain roads. Thankfully they take place in the daytime, this isn't Need for Speed: Carbon. There are a few things that'll catch you out though. For one thing, the player in behind is penalised 2 seconds for any collision with the other car. These are only 1 minute long runs and I was getting times 0.02 seconds faster than the other guy, so a 2 second penalty may as well be an instant fail. Also don't go on the grass! You might think it's okay to take a break for smoke and doughnuts but while your car is helplessly spinning around the other guy is getting an unbeatable lead.

Fortunately you do have one superpower: a limited number of flashbacks. There were a couple of earlier racing games with Sands of Time style rewinds, but I think GRID is the one that popularised them. They're definitely popular with me, as it's so frustrating to lead two laps in a race, make one mistake, and end up falling to last place.

First place is always recommended as that gets you the most rewards from your sponsors, though it's not the only objective.

New offers come in all the time, with different goals, so if you're feeling less confident you can swap in a 'finish in the top five' logo. Or if you're a lunatic you could try 'take no damage'. It seems like your teammate shares your sponsors though, and only one of you can finish in first, so you need to be smart about your chosen objectives. 

Or not. The amount of money you get from this isn't all that huge. In fact the main difference I've noticed from having a teammate in the race at all is that one of the other cars looks like mine.

You do get to change how your team's cars look, but only barely. 

I mean getting to pick the colour and pattern does make a big difference, but you don't get to place the patterns or the logos manually, so there's very little scope for creativity. You can't change your rims, add a spoiler, take the roof off, or anything like that. And definitely no neons. It's way behind what Need for Speed was offering at the time.

Though Need for Speed never had a demolition derby event... that I can recall.

In most races you're discouraged for hitting other races, but in demolition derby... well you probably still shouldn't do it, but it's going to happen eventually. You get some beautiful mid-air collisions on the jumps.

This shot from the replay really shows how vehicles get damaged and deformed, with bits of debris getting scattered all over the track. I don't typically sit and watch the replay in racing games, I've got races to do, but when it started playing here I had to keep watching. I was mesmerised by the way it's edited and the camera angles chosen, it's like a bloody movie. Plus you get the thrilling action music here that's missing from almost all the actual races. It's usually just engine sounds the whole time you're racing.

I often prefer to drive in cockpit view in racing games because I get a better feel for how the car is moving, but I had a few issues with visibility here, especially in the times when there wasn't any. It's hard to weave between traffic and take the lead when my window is less than a third of the screen and all I see through it is cars and smoke. Still they put a lot of work into the different dashboards, which is more than I can say for some of their rivals.

That's what GRID is like all over really. It may be 18 years old now, but back in the day people were getting quality over quantity and that still shines through. In fact, I've seen people say that the series actually declined after this. The only reason they're not still selling this is the licences, as you can't sell a game with Porsches, Ferraris and Lamborghinis etc. indefinitely. It kind of sucks to be honest!

Well I got a fairground wheel but I didn't spot any hot air balloons. I didn't spot any rubber banding going on with the other drivers either, now that I think about it. Sometimes I can take off and leave them way behind, other times I'm firmly in second place, and it always feels natural.

Anyway the question is, does GRID have anything to offer that you can't find in a newer racing game? Was anything lost when it was delisted? I'd say... yes. Racing games aren't like sports games where the sequel only gives you an updated roster and the latest perspiration simulation engine, you could absolutely put this on after getting tired of Forza Horizon 5 and enjoy something different. And I think it is still possible to enjoy it. The older TOCA: Race Driver games can get frustrating due to the lack of rewinds, but GRID gives you a tiny safety net.

Here's another question, is this even available anywhere to buy? The answer is 'yes', actually, thanks to the miracle of physical media! If you've got an Xbox 360, PS3 or even a PC with a DVD drive, you can pick up a used copy on disc and start playing, no always-online requirement, no incompatibilities with DRM... probably. I can at least confirm that the Steam version ran like a dream on my Windows 11 PC, with only a minor change in a text file to increase the resolution. Okay it crashed a couple of times while I was choosing sponsors, but I'm sure there are a bunch of mods you can run to make it more reliable.

I have a feeling I that the last time I played this I made it a little further than this, got stuck and was miserable, but right now I like the game, so I'm giving it a shiny star of okayness.

---

Developer:

BioWare

|

Release Date:

2019

|

Systems:

Win, PS4, Xbone

---

Next it's BioWare's infamous Iron Man simulator Anthem, one of the most high profile live service disasters. Okay, the servers stayed up for 7 years and it sold 5 million copies so it's not quite in Concord's tier, but expectations were not met.

If you've ever played a game like Civilization or XCOM, then you may have reached a point where you realised that you screwed up. But you couldn't just load a previous save, because the mistake you made happened hours ago and you had no idea. All you could do was keep on trying to do the best you could in a situation that was never going to work out. That seems to basically be what happened with Anthem.

Mistake #1 may have been original game director Casey Hudson's original game pitch, which was expertly crafted to make cartoon dollar signs appear in the eyes of EA executives. The ones who were convinced that single-player was dead, or at least wanted everyone else to believe it. This was just before their massively multiplayer SimCity came out and killed its whole franchise, to give you some context.

Hudson message was that BioWare's RPGs were a relic of an older era and a new kind of live service storytelling was needed if they wanted to shift as many copies as the FIFA games! The company hadn't had a flawless track record with its single-player games, rushing Dragon Age II and giving Mass Effect 3 its colourful endings etc. but they were were still one of the most respected RPG developers and forsaking their fans to chase recurrent consumer spending was demoralising to the people who were there to make RPGs, never mind the players.

To be fair, Anthem was being produced alongside the more traditional Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age 4, so BioWare wasn't really abandoning anyone here... at least until they moved staff from Dragon Age 4 onto Anthem, causing the game to get cancelled and eventually replaced with the God of War-inspired action RPG Dragon Age: Veilguard.

But everyone makes mistakes. My own mistake was waiting until after Anthem had permanently shut down to finally take a look at it here.

I took these screenshots a couple of years ago and I was going to write about it back then, but I got distracted. This screen is the last thing I saw of the game and it really shows the biggest issue I had with it. It's not that the online service was flaky, my problem was that it was necessary. And now that's everyone's problem I guess.

Anthem could be played entirely single-player, but it cost BioWare or EA just as much to run a server for one player as it did for a full team of four, so the game encouraged players to team up with random strangers. They could've saved even more money if they'd just let solo players play offline!

I realise that running some of the game code remotely helped them bypass the pain-in-the-ass process of keeping it updated for consoles and it took some of the pressure off their CPUs, but as a PC player I think I could've coped with an offline mode. It would've been nice to have a moment to go look up why 'DLSS' was greyed out on the options screen without it threatening to boot me for inactivity.

Anthem was a third-person over-the-shoulder shooter, featuring a team of up to four Freelancers flying around beautiful tropical scenery and shooting the damage numbers out of bad guys. Enemies had health bars, players had guns... the gameplay was pretty straightforward. Though it didn't exactly fit the template of a standard cover shooter.

My shield was amplified and took reduced damage while I was hovering so I tried to stay airborne and mobile, floating sideways while spraying space bullets.

But the game wasn't just about shooting waves of enemies. Sometimes I'd go investigate the ? on the compass, or harvest some minerals. I don't recall ever finding a use for them, but I'm sure they would've been very important at some point.

And sometimes I had to do a Superman 64 fly-through-the-rings sequence, which at least gave me a chance to fly. The game didn't want players to sustain flight for long so the thrusters on these javelins would quickly overheat. I had to cool my jets or else I'd plummet to the ground.

Did I mention yet that the game looked awesome? If the developers got one thing right it's the scenery that players flew through.  I loved the contrast between the high tech mechs and the ancient ruins, and I'm not sure there's ever been a game which had so many waterfalls.

The reason the place looks so strange is because of ancient Shaper relics using something called the 'Anthem of Creation' to alter the land. It's apparently some kind of automatic terraforming device that's going rogue. So that explains the title of the game... though they actually came up with the name first and then came up with the lore about the Anthem of Creation to justify it later.

The developers were originally thinking of calling this Javelin, but it was considered a bit soft so they went with Beyond. It turns out that Beyond: Two Souls exists though, so they finally settled on Anthem. Personally I think Javelin would've been a better fit, as it follows BioWare's three-syllable naming tradition.

Jav-el-in
Shat-tered Steel
Bal-dur's Gate
Throne of Bhaal
Jade Em-pire
Mass Ef-fect
Dra-gon Age

The game did try to add some variety and give me different things to fly through, but dodging these energy beams was really tricky without depth perception. I couldn't see where they met the floor so I didn't know where they were in relation to me. Oh, you could do a barrel roll by the way.

Another room had me flying around to catch five sparkly energy 'echo' things and I could only carry three before I had come back down to drop them off. So there's some triple-A gameplay for you. Though the real surprise was when I played Starfield afterwards and it made me do the same thing!

I dunno, maybe it would've made more sense with co-op partners. Anyway I shot waves of enemies and picked up three more items and then a cutscene happened. End of that chapter.

Once a level was done I had a chance to look through all my new guns on the loot screen, comparing their statistics. But that seemed boring and the gun I was holding was fine, so I just scrapped them all. I know I wasn't getting into the spirit of looting shooting, but the developers the ones who put that 'mark all for salvage' button there!

I don't recall them giving me a button to swap weapons in combat though and either way I never did. It didn't feel like the kind of game where you use the sniper rifle to take out targets from a distance, then zoom in close with a shotgun. It was about wearing down health bars, using special attacks, and getting a multi-kill XP bonus. Mass Effect combat had a bit more depth than this.

Though I did have to run over to grab the hearts that enemies dropped for me. I thought that was surprisingly considerate of them; you don't expect evil creatures to be carrying javelin exosuit repair kits on them just in case you need one.

In between missions players got to park their javelin unguarded in the middle of Fort Tarsis and then explore the town in the first person. It was a bit like returning to the Normandy in Mass Effect, I even found my mechanic working nearby and had a chat.

Sometimes I actually got a dialogue option, like my mechanic said 'be careful' and I could reply "My javelin gets me through" or "Careful helps me survive". Proper role playing.

The weird thing is, I never saw other players running around, queuing at the quest givers or crowding around the shops. I haven't played many MMOs, but I know that's a thing. There was apparently a hangar that players could use as a social space, but I never went there, don't know anything about it.

The cutscenes kind of reminded me of those FMV games like The Daedalus Encounter where the actors talked directly to the screen. The first-person camera wasn't really participating in the scene. The animation was pretty good though, much better than Mass Effect: Andromeda. People are very expressive. I suppose it helped that this likely had far less dialogue to have to animate and they could spend more time fine tuning it.

That guy peeking in on the left is Owen. He was usually just the voice in my ear during a mission, but I followed the blue triangle to my next objective and it turned out to be him. Now he's hanging around and being cheeky. When I first heard him talking over the radio I thought his voice acting sounded a bit fake, but once I actually met him his character made a lot more sense.

The dude spends his free time trolling the other radio people, and wants to move up from being the voice in my ear to become a full-fledged javelin pilot like me so he 'can afford sandwiches'. I like characters with relatable motivations.

Here's something else that was weird about Fort Tarsis: it was entirely in first-person and there were no other players around to see you, but you could still design what your character looks like outside of their javelin.

Well, you got choose if they're male or female and then pick from a selection of 21 heads at least. It was a bit of a step down from Mass Effect and Dragon Age, especially if you wanted to be blonde, and there weren't a lot of beard options either.

You might think that you needed to choose your face for the romance scenes, as this was a BioWare game. They know their audience, they know why a lot of people are buying their games. But nope! No romances.

There were four different classes of javelin to unlock: one was light and fast, one was tough and heavy, one was a wizard... I decided I liked the sound of elemental damage, so I gave that a go.

Your javelin is what the other players would be seeing during gameplay, so it makes sense that most of the customisation options were here. It didn't just give you different colours to choose from, but also different materials. You could've had some shiny metal for the legs, rubbery armour for the torso, a red tactical fabric cape, and some worn blue paint on the details.

Players could change parts as well, buying them with coin (awarded in-game) or shards (bought with microtransactions). There were also decals you could apply and I got a bunch as rewards, of varying rarities. But it expected me to hold a button and wait a second or two to wait for the flashy unlock animation, so I didn't have the patience to claim them. I thought these features were supposed to psychologically manipulate me into paying money, not put me off! 

There were other things to look at in Fort Tarsis, like a bunch of lore lying around on shelves and tables! 

I like world building in games, I can get properly invested in this stuff, but a game can't just scatter pages of an encyclopaedia around and expect me to give a damn about what it says. I need to be pulled into the story first, I need a reason to care. 

Though I am interested in how these people even ended up in this situation, living in forts and flying javelins across the beautiful wilderness to shut down cataclysms. 

Here's the map I got when I left my sanctuary of Fort Tarsis to head out to the next mission, and it is a strange world out there. This is about half of the game world, it carries on further north, but it's hard to get an idea of the scale because it's so weird.

This is the stuff that has me curious. How long has Fort Tarsis been here? 20 years? 2000 years? Did the humans move here from another country or another planet? Are the cataclysms remodelling the landscape a relatively new problem or have they been going on for centuries? Hopefully the game explained some of the details during the main story. In fact it's possible some of it was mentioned when I watched the intro, but I didn't care at that point so I missed it!

The game insisted here that I should play in public mode because it's better with a squad. Strong alone, stronger together. I ignored it. 

AI sidekicks would've been nice though. They could've commented on stuff as I went around and given me some backup fighting these... whatever they are. This mission was about tracking down a lost Arcanist, so I flew from clue to clue, fighting enemies and then moving on. The path eventually took me into a cave full of bad guys to unleash my Ultimate ability on, and any other ability that was ready to go.

There were a lot of red dots on my compass though, lots of damage indicator triangles showing I was being shot from all directions, and it got a bit intense. A few close calls where my forcefield was down and my health was dropping. It was the Rust Reaver boss that gave me the most trouble though, as his shield blocks attacks from the front, and I was supposed to get behind him. At least that's what Owen told me. Not so simple when there's only one person playing!

Anyway, I went into Anthem hoping that I could appreciate the game for what it was, and I didn't really. The game wasn't horrible, the moment and shooting felt decent enough, but I was getting bored with it long before I hit the grind. I'm sure that's partly because I didn't play it co-op and I'm just not that into third-person shooters in general, but I love the Mass Effect games, I even like Andromeda, so BioWare could've won me over again and they didn't.

It had the same problem Saints Row IV  has where there were a lot of missions where you just had to hang out in one place shooting bad guys for a bit while your buddy talked over the radio, but this had less interesting combat. An RPG can sometimes get away with flawed fighting because it has so much else going on, but Anthem was an action game and they live or die on their gameplay loop.

So Anthem died. Everyone who spent money on it was left with nothing. It's the only BioWare game that no one will ever play again. The end.

---

Developer:

Telltale Games

|

Release Date:

2010

|

Systems:

Win, MacOS

---

The final game I'll be writing about is Poker Night at the Inventory, one of the rare non-episodic non-adventure game Telltale Games games. It's still based on licenced IPs though, because that was Telltale's MO since the very start.

Well okay not the very start, as their first title was Telltale Texas Hold'em, a poker game (or basically minigame) featuring four original characters sitting around a table hanging out, chatting and playing cards. It was apparently made to test their new Telltale Tool engine, as the poker game was an excuse to have four animated characters interact without having to create a story or different locations, or much of anything really. It also tested the crazy new concept of digital distribution, just a few months after Half-Life 2 had forced players to install Valve's game client 'Steam'. In fact I don't think Telltale Texas Hold'em ever got a physical release, but you can still buy it online at least, unlike its spiritual successors.

Both Poker Night games were lost when Telltale Games closed in 2018, and never returned to stores. A lot of the other Telltale games came back, but Poker Night's complicated licensing arrangement likely made it too much of a hassle to work out. Though I've heard there are still some keys around if you've got $150 spare. (The game was $5 originally).

You can tell from my Steam library that I'm not a huge fan of poker. This could've been a list of two dozen free poker games, but I've got no use for them. I only want these two.

In fact the only reason I know anything about poker is because of Poker Night, and it's not because it has a fantastic tutorial. Though it does run through the basics.

Ah, so that's what blind is! Next question, what's an ante?

Actually my next question is: where's the page that tells me what the winning hands are, as I can't imagine that information isn't in the game somewhere. They can't expect a first time player to know what a 'flush' is, right? Right?

I just decided to wing it, using my knowledge picked up from years of watching movies and TV shows with poker scenes. The way I understand it, the trick to succeeding in poker is to just have the best cards and then reveal them dramatically at the end.

The game doesn't have a story, but it does have an intro. In fact for a moment I thought I was playing a BioShock game, as the mysterious player walks up to that door you can see in the title screen and a lift brings them down into the depths of The Inventory.

You're met by Commodore Reginald Van Winslow (retired) from Tales of Monkey Island, who enters the room from a secret entrance hidden behind a bookcase. I want to know where the secret door goes!

Winslow has been indulging in benedictions of this exclusive establishment and when he realises that you're new he offers a bit of backstory. The club was founded in 1919 due to concerns about an early draft of the 18th amendment which banned gaming along with alcohol. So this is basically a speakeasy, except nothing here is actually illegal.

The stars of the game are Max from Sam & Max, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, Heavy from Team Fortress 2, and Tycho from Penny Arcade. All things that people still remember to this day, probably. That's pretty impressive considering that Homestar Runner was a Flash website and Penny Arcade is a webcomic.

Why these four characters? Max and Strong Bad are easy to figure out, as they'd just had their own Telltale adventure games. Heavy is because they were working with Valve (play the game and get TF2 unlocks!!), and Tycho is presumably because Telltale did a lot of marketing at PAX (formerly Penny Arcade Expo). This wasn't Tycho's first game, he'd already been in On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, but that wasn't a Telltale game and I think this is the first time he'd ever been voiced.

Anyway, basically what happens is that you sit down at the table, you're given two cards, and then characters do a bit of banter. Oh, also you have to decide if you want to add more money to the pot to continue, or fold and accept your losses. 

Three cards are placed in the middle of the table, and you get another chance to decide if it's worth paying to stay in the game. Two more cards are added over two more turns, and the person who can make the highest scoring hand out of the seven cards available wins all the money on the table.

It's Texas hold 'em, so if you know how to play that then you're sorted.

The game's not about winning or losing though, it's about hanging out with four video game characters and listening to their hilarious and well written conversations! Though winning actually gets you a bunch of stuff, like new table designs and eventually TF2 items.

Developer:

Telltale Games

|

Release Date:

2013

|

Systems:

PC, X360, PS3, iOS

---

Plus there are a number of bounty challenges you can pass to... hang on, sorry, this is the sequel. It's hard to tell because of how nearly identical they are. But I suppose the entirely different set of players is a clue.

Poker Night 2 was released three years later and this time the game was multiplatform, releasing on consoles and iOS (though not the Wii U for some reason). The time jump between the games shows in the animation quality and general slickness of the experience. It still does that thing where you've got four characters from different IPs with wildly different art styles, but Telltale had made Walking Dead, Jurassic Park and Back to the Future in the meantime and they had the connections to bring in some movie and TV stars.

So this time it's Brock Sampson from The Venture Bros., Ash from the Evil Dead movies (voiced by someone doing a decent Bruce Campbell impersonation), and Sam from Sam and Max! Oh, also Claptrap from Borderlands for some reason.

On the plus side the game starts by showing what's behind the secret bookcase door! Turns out there's nothing back there, just a brick hallway, so that's a bit disappointing. Still, at least now I know.

Bringing licenced characters together into the same game or story has been thoroughly done by this point. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Smash Bros., Ready Player One, Space Jam, Fortnite and so on. It's not special any more, and the characters themselves tend to be reduced to basically Funko Pops, there to be recognised instead of adding anything.

The two Poker Nights aren't like that though, as the characters aren't just treated well by the games, they are the games. It's all about getting to see how each group of four characters would interact with each other, and the writing and acting is good enough to support that. Everyone's in character and it's not afraid to dip into their lore.

The visuals were a bit dated even at the time, but the animation gets the job done and you have to pay attention to how they act, as they have tells that give away what they really think about their cards. Here, Sam's body language is hinting that he may be unhappy.

If you don't know what you're doing then poker is like a fruit machine, where you keep putting money in and sometimes it gives you a winning row. The trick to actually playing it as a game is to know when to bluff and recognise when others are bluffing. Unfortunately I'm terrible at it, and the game dropping the 'normal' difficulty option that the first game had isn't helping. The only reason I'm winning here is that I have a pair of aces and the percentages are telling me this is good. 

Still, it had to happen eventually and it's nice to take out Ash and Sam in the same round. Wait, no it isn't, this means it's just me and Claptrap! I hate the 'deliberately annoying character' trope so much, because they're annoying, and with everyone else gone he's the only one left to do the talking.

I tried going all-in to bluff and trick Claptrap into thinking I had a much better hand. It apparently works best when there are good cards on the table, as it's plausible that you have just what's needed to complete the set.

Bluffing doesn't work against a guy with a full house though, so I just gave away most of my money in one go. I'm kind of sad it wasn't all of it to be honest, as I want to be released from this poker game!

I do appreciate all the animation though. Max isn't even a player this time and he still got to join in.

But the big guest star for this game is GlaDOS from Portal, who plays the role of the dealer and pops up every now and then to roast players and sometimes join in with their songs. It's a shame she's such a homicidal manic in her own games, as she actually works well in a casual setting with other characters who can actually talk.

Sadly only one of these characters would ever make another appearance in a Telltale game and that is... Claptrap, in Tales of the Borderlands. Telltale grew too big to make point and click adventures, so Sam and Max did not return. They got too big for poker games too.

Well my inevitable failure proved to be sadly inevitable. But I did stick around long enough to knock some other players out this time, which means I earned some tokens! Tokens can be spent on new designs for chips, cards, and table felts, and if you complete a matching set then the whole room transforms! That's what I've been told anyway, I never played that far.

Oh, I just remembered that the game includes an Omaha poker mode this time! It's like Texas hold 'em, except different.

Anyway, if Anthem stripped everything from Mass Effect except the shooting and made it online only, the Poker Night games are the opposite, as they're all about hanging around with your team, listening to them comment on stuff and make jokes. In fact there's no multiplayer at all. The Poker Nights are basically like the minigames you'd find in something like Red Dead Redemption or Yakuza - they're not really intended to compete with typical poker games, so if the banter wasn't good then they'd have little reason to exist.

But the writing is good enough and everyone's entirely in character, so it's a shame that Telltale's great experiment in digital downloads led to the games getting delisted with no physical copies ever made, as they're the only opportunity that anyone will ever have to see these characters interact. Well, unless you just watch all the dialogue on YouTube, and if you like poker as much as I do that might even be the better option.

I will give them a star though, they can split it between them.

---

Thanks for reading about one or more of those games! If you've got opinions to share, that would be awesome, I've got a message box for you to use, it's right there underneath this text.

If you want to take a guess at what the next game will be, you can do that too, I'll not stop you.