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

With a sequel due at some point before too long (nice window there), the number one title on Gamecube to date is Super Smash Bros Melee. There are an awful lot of people out there who have a Wii (which sports full Gamecube reverse-compatibility) and never owned a Gamecube, so I thought I’d devote this second Second Spin to Melee, which came out early in the Cube’s lifespan and still stands up as an excellent game today, and probably the best multiplayer game I’ve ever played, online or off.

To give you some idea of the impact this game had, the first time I played it, I only owned one Gamecube game, and I rented Melee. Twice. Twice, that is, knowing full well that I’d be buying the game as soon as I could afford it, and knowing it was not a sound financial act. I finally got around to picking up a used copy, but in the end, ended up spending more money on the game, and renting additional controllers to play it with others, than buying it new would have set me back.

Super Smash Bros Melee is a fighting game that supports up to four players simultaneously. It boasts a number of different modes including an Adventure mode that has you performing specific tasks in recreated scenes from a number of classic Nintendo games, from Super Mario Bros. to F-Zero. There’s even a mode where you go through dozens of missions, usually something like “beat everyone who shows up”, which get progressively more brutal. I’m up to somewhere around mission 35, and I believe there are 50 missions, and this is where the Second Spin comes in.

I left Melee on the shelf for a while after unlocking (I think) the last of the characters and most of the stages you can fight in, especially once I got my Nintendo DS back in 2005. The missions were too hard for me, and I was stuck around 30, but now I’m back in the fray, and the frustration level is high this late in the game. I would love to have some people to play it with multiplayer again, but without online play, that’s a tougher task every day.

Still, the single player modes alone are even enough to make this game worthwhile in any collection. Even after Brawl comes out on Wii, it’s likely there will still be a number of compelling reasons to keep this one around. I’m hoping Brawl is able to see the save on the card from Melee and give those of us who picked it up some nice bonuses.