Artist C.M. Coolidge's unusual early 20th-century painting Looks Like Four of a Kind (commonly referred to as "dogs playing poker") has become a part of American kitsch culture, and it is now the subject of ValuSoft's new poker game for the PC. In the game, you play as a human player who shares a card table with "18-plus dogs and one crazy cat," though the game also includes a few other critters, like a robot dog and an illiterate iguana. Dogs Playing Poker features a total of five poker games, plus two additional variations, so it doesn't have a lot of breadth, but since it retails for only $10, it actually packs in a surprising amount of value.
The game itself features a total of five poker games: five-card draw, five-card stud, seven-card stud, Texas hold-'em, and Omaha hold-'em. You can play each poker game with up to five computer opponents who will be of beginner, intermediate, or advanced skill levels, and you'll generally play each game until you bankrupt everyone, until you get bankrupted yourself, or until your boss walks into the room, forcing you to Alt-Tab out of the game before you get caught playing games at work. Dogs Playing Poker also has comprehensive tutorials that do a good job of explaining each game. The game lets you choose to play a default beginner, intermediate, or advanced game, or set your own custom options, including which opponents you play against, which of the game's four backgrounds you'll play in, and your betting amounts. And Dogs Playing Poker plays decently well for a poker game, though you'll find that your computerized opponents have the rather suspicious habit of putting together rare hands like full houses and straights a lot more often than you will. And unfortunately, you can't fully customize your play options--you're forced to use the game's preset options for each player's starting purse, each game's ante amounts, and each game's wild cards, for instance.
Dogs Playing Poker looks and sounds decent. The game's interfaces are minimal, but they're clean and easy to use. The game has only four different backgrounds to play games in: a kitchen, a casino, a poker table, and an executive office. They're all colorful, but there are simply too few of them. The dogs (and cat and robot and iguana) themselves are chunky 3D models that look surprisingly decent, and they're animated with a peculiar humanlike quality--the same kind you may have seen in recent television commercials that star computer-generated animals that act like people. Unfortunately, these critters are mostly silent. They'll occasionally let out a brief yelp or a bark, though there seem to be very few sound samples in the game, and the same samples are often used for different dogs. In terms of music, the game has only five tracks--one for the menu screen and one for each background--but they generally consist of appropriately goofy big-band music (with a tuba providing oompah-pah-pah bass) that's suitable enough for the subject.
As you might expect from glancing at the game's box, Dogs Playing Poker is a quirky, humorous game. And it actually has some character, though unfortunately, the developer apparently didn't go far enough in trying to give the game personality. The dogs themselves are disappointingly static and silent--rather than have speaking lines, they have static "cartoon thought balloons," and though they'll periodically shuffle the deck, toss chips into the pot, and occasionally shift in their chairs, they don't really move around all that much. If your opponents had been more lively, had featured more sound samples, and had generally looked and sounded better, Dogs Playing Poker could've had quite a bit more in the way of personality and charm.
Then again, you get dogs, five games of poker, and fairly good music for 10 bucks, so it's a decent enough package. Dogs Playing Poker might not be as clever or as funny as it could have been, but for its price, it's a decent alternative to solitaire if all you're looking for is a quick Windows desktop game.
