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

It looks like Midway has a big problem on its hands with Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. The shooter appeared in 2004 on the PS2 and Xbox and looks to have been a complete ripoff of someone’s screenplay written six years before. This is too bad, because I really enjoyed it on the PS2 and liked it so much that I bought more than one copy of it once the game’s price fell to clearance levels and gave it away, urging people to play it.

Psi-Ops was an underappreciated gem of a shooter on the PS2. Midway’s game fused elements of Force-like powers from Star Wars with the Havok physics engine that would later grace Half-Life 2, and put it together with shooter gameplay that was pretty tightly put together overall. The plot was a little bit over the top, but the control scheme used for the psychic powers was excellent. A full set of tutorials taught you everything you needed to know about the powers and how best to use them, and the levels put you to the test. I was just reading over some of my notes on when I played it, and I remember “surfing” on items, using telekinesis (or TK) to pick up a platform I was standing on and float it up to where I needed to go. Now that’s a game engine.

Plus an easter egg item hidden in each level was a garden gnome. With gnomes, how can a game go wrong? I just wish Midway hadn’t cribbed the whole setting and idea from that screenwriter. It’s hard not to side with the writer given everything cited by Gamespot, but it really doesn’t look good for Midway.

Via Gamespot.