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

Those of us who grew up in the 80s have a special place in our hearts for giant robots that could change into semi trucks, cars, jets, boom boxes, cassette tapes, and even entire cities. I don’t think there was a rotary phone robot, was there?

Twenty years ago — hold on I need to adjust my bifocals so I can see the keyboard — we got an animated film spinoff from the cartoon series about these robots in disguise, and in 2006 it got the 20th Anniversary Edition treatment. The big metal gang of Transformers has taken many plot twists and turns since then, being reborn into new situations with new robots, some having old names, some having new forms, some coming from all sorts of places to continue the age-old fight between the Autobots and the evil forces of the Decepticons. I’ll bet some of the youngest whippersnapper autobots don’t even know where their name came from. Good old Teletran-1, looking out for those robots…

Anyway, there’s a new, live-action (*cough* CGI) Dreamworks film about this cherished franchise coming out July 4th of this year and if you think it’s an excellent opportunity to make video games featuring the Transformers you’re not alone. There will be a game version of the Transformers movie hitting every last game platform out there.

It will even be hitting the Nintendo DS. Even though it’s not about training robot brains, tapping a tune for giant robot cheerleaders, teaching a big robot dog tricks, having your robot do gardening and write letters, or trying to fit their massive steel frames into a hotel to solve a mystery, it will still make it to the DS.

The game version of Transformers is already trading heavily on the nostalgia factor in the initial announcement that listed the playable robots. It’s slated to have a total of nine playable robots including Optimus “It’s Over” Prime, “Wait I Still Function” Megatron, “I Should Lead” Starscream, “Autobots, roll out” Ironhide, and Bumblebee. Sorry, nothing catchy came to mind for the yellow Volkswagen Beetle autobot. And those are just the full-sized console versions. However, the live-action film is said to have “references” to Generation 1 transformers.

The PSP version will have a total of 20 playable robots from the live-action film and previous generations. Again, this makes me think we’ll be seeing a lot of the latest generations of transformers in the title. If I have to work through those to get to the hard candy center of G1 robots, I think I can handle it.

Hands-on information about the game shows it to be something of a sandbox game, with autobots encouraged to stay in vehicle form to avoid attracting too much attention. The press release mentions melee attacks and projectile weapon attacks, so we might get some good rock’em sock’em action.

But make no mistake, this is a movie game. These are very rarely any good. There are two things that give me hope, however. One, the PS2 Transformers game that came out a year or so ago was actually pretty good — I enjoyed the mini-con powerup system that gave you good weapon and equipment variety but eventually burned out on it trying to deal with the older-school level designs. If Hasbro has a hand in the game development, they might be able to point at that game and say “Better than that, please.” as a starting point. Two, all of the non-portable versions are being developed by Travelers Tales, the Lego Star Wars people.

I don’t know anything about Savage, who is making the PSP version, and Vicarious Visions, while having done good work on the PSP with at least X-Men Legends II, doesn’t ring any bells for me on the DS. Anyone have comments on those developers? Should we be afraid?

Via PSPWorld and 360Arcadians.