Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games: Information from Answers.com Mobile

Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games

Platform: IBM PC Compatible
Release Date: 2000 01
Genre: Traditional
Style: Card Game
Similar Games: Bicycle Deluxe Family Fun Card Games (IBM PC Compatible), Card Classics (IBM PC Compatible), Bicycle Games: Card (IBM PC Compatible)

Game Description

When it comes to card games, Expert Software covers the gamut, having put out PC card games that focus on only variations of one type, as with their Bicycle Pinochle, and those that focus on multiple versions of multiple types of card games, as with this title, Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games.

In Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games, players have the option of choosing from old favorites, such as blackjack, bridge, cribbage, 2 different hearts games, 3 pinochle games, 10 poker games, 4 rummy games, 40 solitaire games, and 2 spades games, or from some of the lesser-known card games, such as whist and euchre. For kids interested in whiling away their youth and vigor in front of a computer screen, Expert Software has included a Kids Corner section that features four long-play games: old maid, war, go fish, and crazy eights.

Regardless of their age, players are dealt a number of options for facilitating their card-playing experience. Cards come in three different sizes for easier viewing (there's also a magnify feature), and onscreen hints, game rules, and a strategy guide help stack the deck in the player's favor. Players can select from ten different animated portraits, and each portrait comes with a sound theme for in-game sequences, such as when a hand is won. For instance, if a player chooses the clown portrait, a circus whistle will sound if that player wins a hand.

Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games also features 15 card backs and 14 themes to choose from, which help personalize the experience. Also, if players are more in the mood for a little Mozart than for the synthetic game tunes included, they can pop in their own audio CDs and let them rip. From within the different games themselves, players have access to a number of options. They can view the running scores for that particular session, save or load games, visit the bank for a loan, or adjust the parameters of the game, such as scoring and wild-card options. Online play and chat functions are available as well (the game even simulates table chat among the different CPU competitors during single-player sessions).

With a point-and-click interface and minimal system requirements, this title does its best to shuffle together the conveniences of the PC with the fun a deck of good, old-fashioned playing cards can bring. Whether you're a card fanatic looking to perfect your strategies, or just an idle corporate employee looking to make the "most" of company time, Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games offers a variety of ways to satisfy all your card-playing cravings.

~ Gil Shif, All Game Guide

Review: Overall

My first glimpse of Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games, published by Expert Software, Inc., left me relatively impressed. The game features a hefty array of league card games: Pinochle, Hearts, Spades, solitaire, Rummy, Euchre, Cribbage, Bridge, Whist, poker, and blackjack. There's also a child's section that offers such games as War, Old Maid, and Go Fish. This selection seems worthy of the Bicycle trademark but, despite the rampant branding, you soon realize why Bicycle makes cards, not software.

I play cards with my boss at work every Friday but for an addict like me, once a week doesn't cut it. My fingers were itching to get Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games installed and operational. I found the menu screens fairly attractive with the usual mouse-over graphics and pseudo-realist drawings of your fantasy recreation room with the requisite card table--complete with pictures of carbonated beverages. The games themselves have Windows-like theme settings so you can, as your tastes demand, transform your table from a pristine winter scene to a velvet-covered wonder. For the visually challenged, the game offers a nice option that magnifies the face of the card as you hold your mouse over it. Your CPU opponents' faces pop up in the command display during their turns.

Game play seems relatively challenging as Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games offers a nice selection of game variations. You can play ten kinds of poker with several player-determined options, although you can't pick the number of CPU players. You can select the CPU players' expertise levels but it's nothing like pitting yourself against humans, whose less predictable actions give them an advantage.

For the memory-challenged, some games let you "arrow back" through previous tricks (rounds) so you don't need to keep track of what's been played. And, since it's a feature of the game, we don't have to call it cheating. Certainly, the game is as entertaining for the single player as standard solitaire (in that addictive sort of way) and if you're really serious, you can use the multiplayer options to challenge your friendly modem-wielding, card-playing nemeses (network and serial connections are also available).

Games that require keeping track of more cards, like four-handed pinochle that uses a special deck, blow games like Microsoft Windows's Hearts out of the water in terms of enjoyment. On the other hand, Bicycle Totally Cool Card Games could use a speed setting for games that need less time for thought, such as War. Based on my baby-sitting experience, I don't know a single kid who would have the patience to sit through each hand of War as it slowly appeared and disappeared from the screen. With a game that simple, the whole point is to slam down the cards as fast as you can until you can declare a war. This makes the kid's option seem more like an excuse for the card-playing parent to indulge in buying a game for the "whole family."

So, out of this mixed bag, the one real sour note is the "tutorial" aspect. I say "tutorial" because for the more intricate games, you really can't learn to play from the game's one-line instructions that pop up on your turn. I found that only through carefully reading the somewhat tedious rules of the game sections and then testing these rules through regular play was I then able to benefit from the low-level tutorial suggestions. Ultimately, they taught me how to play a tiny bit better--or rather how the computer plays--once I already knew the basics of the games. Here again, the human aspect is lacking when the tutorial doesn't remember that you've just discarded the suit that it's now telling you to save. In Rummy, the tutorial advised me into a stalemate (which the program didn't recognize), endlessly urging me to play out the same no-win cards over and over again.

These quibbles, along with what would eventually drive any sane individual crazy, namely the shrill sound effects, poorly scripted dialog and narrator's insistent voice ("You must discard."), made the game less fun than it could have been. Bottom line: this might be the only game I've come across that will interactively teach me Whist but, as for Pinochle and such, I'll rely on my Friday regulars for a real challenge.