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

Over the past two days, there has been a lot written about the 50GB install of Stranglehold, and I think people have started throwing that number around without truly understanding what it means. As the box states, you need 15GB of hard drive space to run the game, but the instructions talk about 50GB of space needed, which people have run with.

The reality is that the game only takes up 15GB of space when you have finished the installation. No more, no less, with the exception of a little bit of save data that is added, but the save game data is less than a meg of space. Where did this other number come from. Well, when you install the game, it uncompresses the data before installing it. Those files are not removed until the end of the game. The total space used during the install is 50GB, but once the complete install is finished, the other files are deleted.

Also, it should be known that the space if variable. For instance, I install all of my data on a separate partition in my RAID array. The install instructions state that only 20GB of your primary, or OS partition will be used. The rest of the data is put on the drive where the game is being installed. This can be found in the manual and the readme file on the DVD.

Now the one thing that I will find Midway guilty of is optimization of the game files. Many games have come out before this that have been better optimized in terms of space and storage. My guess is that Midway did not work hard enough to optimize the files in regards to the install process, but when it is completed, the game is down to a managable size. It would be one of the biggest games I have witnessed in some time, although, I remember the Matrix Online taking up a nice 12GB footprint on my drive. Luckily, drive space is cheap nowadays.