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

Several years ago, I got Neverwinter Nights, and I haven’t really done any PC gaming since. The game, early on, felt as if it had been rushed to market. There were a lot of bugs and issues to the game. One of the biggest examples I can recall is that the toolset for the game did not run. At all. You would start it, and it would immediately crash the computer. It was that bad.

A wave of massive patches from Bioware, which seemed to come out hourly, eventually stabilized the program, but I had no idea. At some point along the line there, my motherboard developed some kind of problem. Something slight that didn’t show up until the system was called upon to get involved, at which point everything would come crashing down spectacularly.

Paul will remember my rage against Bioware for the quality of the bug testing, which eventually was completely misdirected as my own computer was falling apart at the seams. I didn’t discover this until I tried to play another, far less intensive 3D game, and the computer couldn’t do it.

The damage was done. I had had enough of PC gaming, and today, I don’t do it at all anymore.

Fast-forward now to just a couple of days ago. I walked up to my computer, which is two generations on from that broken one, to wake it from a power-save mode, and it never woke up. I killed the power, and on reboot, all the visuals were completely scrambled, and I got a BSOD before I could get a desktop. After a couple of attempts, I realized that my video card was likely shot, and I hopped onto the MacBook to order a new one.

I ordered the cheapest video card I could find, which turned out to be running an nVidia 6200LE 128MB chipset, to replace my twitching nVidia GeForce Ti4200 64MB. I wasn’t aware of whether this was an upgrade or some kind of a lateral move, because gaming was not a consideration. PC gaming now would require me to throw everything in my system out the window and start over. I probably couldn’t even use the mouse.

After some perplexing issues that led me to believe it wasn’t the video card that caused the problem just long enough for me to order a new iMac, the computer is back up and running, and I have to say I’m keen on migrating to the iMac once it arrives. Have you seen that thing? Slick. And there’s the key. Now that I’ve long given up on PC gaming, I’m ready to change platforms. Linux is too much work, and of course I hate Windows very much and always have (despite a brief honeymoon when Windows XP came out and my computer stopped crashing). Boot Camp aside, doing modern gaming on the iMac is just about the furthest thing from my mind. It’ll be great for blogging and podcasting, and it will look nice on my desk. Maybe it won’t sound like an F-15 taking off like my PC does because of all the cooling fans.

It will make it that much easier to hear my Wii.