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

I just got my invite to the Shadowrun Beta, and before I actually start in and start seeing stuff that’s covered by the NDA, I need to air some of the grievances I’ve had with the game since its lackluster E3 debut.

First and foremost is that, as a long time fan of the Shadowrun pen and paper RPG, I absolutely abhor the blatant bastardization that they’ve done to the Shadowrun universe lore. Due to a LOT of angry gamers, the developers went back and re-wrote a lot of their “take a giant dump on the RPG” backstory. It’s actually almost palatable now.

The developers’ attitudes during E3 really bothered me as well. They came off as really arrogant in their interviews, and more often than not talked about Shadowrun being the “Counter-Strike killer”. Please, can we evalutate your game on its own merits (or lack thereof) without comparing to the current genre dominator. I guess that really worked out for Killzone, didn’t it.

And those E3 gameplay videos… blech! Levels looked stale and barren, models look downright silly, and gameplay looked like more of the same.

So, as of now, I’ve had a less-than-stellar impression of Shadowrun. It’ll be interesting to see how the game has progressed up to this point.