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

Developer: Bizarre Creations

Publisher: Valve Software (Steam)

Right out of the gate I can’t recommend this version of Geometry Wars for one big reason and a few smaller ones. But before I dig into the negatives, let me say some nice things.

First this game is very cheap, at just $2.50 for a limited time via Steam, which just about everybody already has. Buying it using a credit card was quick and painless right through the Steam UI, and the 60 MB download was very fast.

Second the gameplay is definitely the real deal. This is Geometry Wars, right down to the sound effects and music. You can play it with a mouse and keyboard, a two-stick joystick, or an XBox 360 Controller if you have one available. I was able to set up my Dual Shock 2 controller to play it using a USB dongle and aside from having to hit the Analog button to get the analog sticks to work and then use the triangle button to make menu selections it worked well. Except for entering your name when you get a high score, but that ties into the bad news.

The video options allow you to play preserving the aspect ratio or not. Neither resolution available when preserving the aspect ratio would work for me — it would go to a black screen — even though my desktop met or exceeded the resolutions. I also wasn’t able to successfully change resolutions most of the time. It would change it, but I would have to kill the program from Task Manager, then reload the game, and it would be running in that resolution. You can play it in a window, which is nice, so you can then drag the corner and scale it to your screen. I’d like to have seen it at the right aspect ratio, but maybe a patch will fix that.

The big negative that keeps me from recommending this game despite all its flaws? No leaderboards.

The game’s high score list is offline only, stuck on your computer. I would’ve been happy with an online set of leaderboards that was separate from those on Xbox Live or Games for Windows Live, but there’s nothing, nada, nil. As a side annoyance, when entering my name into the high scores list, I wasn’t able to stop writing in letters using the controller, resulting in very long names on my scoreboard. I’m thinking I needed to hit enter or some such, but that’s not really intuitive.

If you can get past that, it’s a great and frantic shooter at a dirt cheap price. I’m glad to have it on my desktop so I can play it while my wife watches TV, but I’d have paid more for it if it had had online leaderboards.

06-20 Update: Apparently the game has already been patched because I’m able to switch resolutions correctly this morning. Thanks to Andrew Herron to alerting me to this patch. The patch doesn’t appear in the game’s Update History in Steam, though. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

Also of note: This game’s shortcomings appear to be exactly the same as the Vista version’s shortcomings as noted by Gamespot in their review.