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

The other day I unpacked a box from an online vendor and tossed it in the corner to be broken down for recycling when I could get to it later. (That or it would become a boat for my daughter to put my son in and drag him around the room.) When the box landed in the corner it flipped over and revealed two things. One, the labels you see in this picture and two, that Hideo Kojima wasn’t just making up simple labels when he called boxes “Box A”, “Box B”, and “Box C” in his Metal Gear Solid games. They actually have names like that!

That other label, on the left, has various ratings for this box. Things like how much it can carry, what its crush resistance is, and so on. What it doesn’t have is how good the box is at hiding you from enemy soldiers.

Did anyone else find hiding in a box in MGS3: Subsistence just too nerve wracking to be useful? I mean they would nearly always walk up to the box and uncover you unless it was sitting right next to another batch of identically-marked boxes. (Not to be confused with specially-marked boxes. That’s what the toys are in.) If you were sharp-eyed and noticed what kind of boxes were lying around, and you also had that kind of box in your inventory, you were in luck. Unfortunately I was too busy trying to see the rest of the plot to play the slow sneaking game, so I would alert the guards over, and over, and over again.

In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops your team goes around in a truck and all but your active player hide in cardboard boxes around the level. When you opt to change to another person on your team, you pick a pre-set hiding spot near you to hide in a box, and then the chosen team member is found inside another box elsewhere in the level. Hit the button to stand and you spring out like a heavily armed Jack-In-The-Box to get into the act. Thankfully in Portable Ops you can appear inside a cardboard box right next to an enemy and if you stay put they can be staring right at the box and they won’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me happy.