Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It’s been almost ten years since I first played GTA. You know, the top-down carjacking simulators that were short on graphics but high on gameplay. They had a very arcade-y kind of feel back then. There was a sort of innocence… Sure, you were still beating the crap out of unsuspecting drivers, but it was a different time. No Columbine shootings. No Jack Thompson. Some would say, a simpler time.

Well, the times they are a-changin’. Grand Theft Auto III brought the GTA series fully into 3D. Back in the day, I gave it a whirl, but I had trouble seeing the point. Sure, it was fun once I found the cheat code to drop tanks wherever I wanted, but the novelty of driving over endless piles of car wore off quickly. I always found the missions banal and uninspired. The kind of fare more appropriate for a SpikeTV original series.

Yeah, I’ve not been a huge fan of the “action-driving genre” or “sandbox genre” or whatever the heck it is they’re calling it this week. Although, Destroy All Humans was kinda fun for a while. It had the voice of Invader Zim, which immediately earns some points. But still, even that game grew stale after a half dozen or so missions.

Along comes Crackdown. It’s GTA3 with something that slightly resembles a story, heavy RPG elements, and the kind of action and gunplay that made Just Cause an instant hit in my book. Oh, and you get super powers. Sounds awesome… They’re basically taking all of the gameplay elements I love and putting them into one game. It smacks of hubris, to attempt such a game. Who can say?

But there’s that demo. I don’t really feel like the demo has given me an adequate chance to sit down and really dig into this game. When I arrive at Microsoft’s campus this Friday (a process I would’ve referred to as assimilation back in the day), I’ll have the chance to sit down and spend some quality time with what I hope is the finished version of the game.

It should be noted that with the looming specter of a little thing called the HALO 3 BETA, if Crackdown doesn’t establish itself on its own merits, it’s very likely it could forever be swallowed up in the blackness of “games that could’ve been but never had a friggin’ chance because of silly marketing tricks.”