Simply put, where the hell is Texas Hold’m for the PSP?!

I mean, UMD movies? Yay, I guess – I’m sorta hard pressed to buy a movie that I can’t play on my regular TV. And before Sony can build a UMD player for my home system, how about you just allow the PSP to play to S-Video out or something? I won’t buy a $150 UMD player when I’ve already spent $250 on a UMD player that should work with my other stuff.

Pricy games that no one has heard of? Sure, they’re important – the more media available the better! – but how in the hell did this fall through the cracks?!

Poker is insanely popular right now. How can I say that? Take two movies, with 15 years between their debuting days, and they offer proof. Can’t Buy Me Love had a few references where the uber-nerds played poker every Friday night. Ocean’s Eleven has a bunch of popular young stars playing poker in an exclusive LA bar – and sucking at it no less. That’s how you’ll know that a “hobby” crosses over into “popular past time”. Never mind the fact that places like Bed Bath and Beyond are selling chip and card sets. Scary.

So where’s Texas Hold’m for the PSP? One version of it – World Championship, is the name I think – is on all the major consoles. Honest – all of them: PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Advance, and DS. Some of them can be played online, or at least, sorta. I have to admit that Halo 2 and Bungie have spoiled me. I play Halo 2 online and grabbing a game is a piece of cake: everything is done for me. The longest I’ve ever had to wait was a minute, and I think that was during the beta. They did it right. Also, Twisted Metal on the PSP… they went in the other direction and list the games for you to choose, but they keep their list up to date and their user navigation shows that they thought about some potential problems. I usually find a game on the first try – something as many as three attempts are required (to find an available game) but it does work.

Texas Hold’m on the Xbox, however, needs some major help. I’ve seen it on two different casino games, actually – it’s a mess on both. You get a list of games available… because you’ve sucked before, you have the lowest amount of chips you can have: $24 – you need to find a $22 game to play as there’s a “realistic” $2 entrance fee. You tell the game this and it takes that into account when you get the list of games. You join one – *BZZZZ* “Sorry, the minimum buy in is $3 million!” You try again – *BZZZZ* “Sorry that game is full”. Back to the “start searching” screen now… you don’t even get the list back! Usually after 10 minutes of buy-in frustation, full games, and missing games, I switch back to Halo 2.

And the biggest mess out of all of this is that there’s nothing for the PSP – online enabled or not.

Ridiculous.