The Armchair Empire - PC Reviews: Black Jack Pro


	Platform PC Genre Card Games Publisher G3 Studios Developer G3 Studios ESRB E (Everyone) Released E (Everyone)

- Solid game for PDAs, but really doesn’t do much of anything for desktops - Variety of rule formats: Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Downtown, Reno, Atlantic City - Solid Sound – Both music and speech

- Can’t mute sound on opening for some inexplicable reason - Can’t be multitasked – program crashes if you open another window

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Black Jack Pro

Score: 7.0 / 10

Reviewing a title like Black Jack Pro is difficult, because it really represents a program that was purposely designed for the PDA market and then ‘ported to the desktop. On a PDA, this game is probably one of the better ones available. It’s everything you need – vibrant, easy to use, and quiet (if you don’t have sound). On a standard desktop, the game really doesn’t come off much more superior to the types of card games that are pre-loaded in Windows or could be downloaded off ZDnet.

The game offers 4 rule variations to play: Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Downtown, Reno, or Atlantic City. In a nutshell, each of these rule sets differ how they are required to hit up to (they hit up to 16 but some also hit on soft 17), when you can double down, and the number of times that a pair can be split. It’s all just details for the most part, but if you have a preference of the rules that you play, here you go (all those professional gamblers out there will probably have a beef with that statement… so I’ll state a pre-emptive “I know, I’m sorry.”). The game boasts a help menu for those would be card-sharks who are interested in learning how to count cards or how to play the percentages on drawn cards. It wasn’t available in my version, so I can’t comment on its thoroughness or effectiveness.

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Once you create a player, you have the opportunity to choose the specific rule variation, how much money you have (as if that would ever happen in reality -- here’s to dreaming!), and what table limit you want to play. This is a great opportunity to be a high baller once in your life – you might as well be playing with non-existent money, just be careful to not spend time in the “Virtual Casinos” with that tactic. The game play itself is superbly idiot-proof. Once you’ve

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placed your bet correctly (the game will not let you play under or over the table limits) and the cards are dealt, you are given a list of your playable options: if you need insurance, stand, hit, double down… et cetera. It is a real nice setup that works to help out beginners but doesn’t annoy veterans. The graphics are decent, the dealer is a pair of white gloves that deal individual cards and there were some grains visible but nothing too bad or distracting. The sound is good, especially the dealer’s voice, but the title movie is surprisingly loud (as I found out opening the game inside my office) and cannot be muted.

My only major complaint with Black Jack Pro is with the stability of the program. The game cannot be multitasked, I tried to bring up my email a few times while playing and crashed my game, which spurred me to test it with other programs. For some reason, if you cover the window that the game is playing in without minimizing it first the game will crash. This flaw also extends to unwanted pop-ups while running some file-sharing software which knocked me off of a decent winning streak. This is the sort of flaw that really distracts from the enjoyment of the game.

All in all, this is either a great PDA game or an average (yet quirky) desktop card game. I’d definitely recommend downloading the demo version.

- Tazman

"Someone hook me up with a flame, I'm having a ‘nic fit."

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