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

As most listeners of the podcast and readers of the site are aware, I have been hyping Stranglehold and the fact that I have it pre-ordered for the PC. I have also written about the possible specs needed to run this thing at minimum and whether you would need a beast of a PC to run it like our console breathern. So I kept clamoring about hoping a demo would come out for us PC gamers to test it before the game comes out.

Well the demo came out today and it runs really good. Until you start to dig in and you realize that Midway is pulling a fast one on all of us. You have suspicions at first when you notice that there are not graphical options when you start playing. But good for us, the game is built on the Unreal Engine 3.0, which means we can garner a lot of info from the .ini file. And let me tell you, it really irritated me when I found what I found.

First off, all the pictures including the above have been linked to so you can see a full version by clicking on them. Anyway, the first picture above was the first tip off. Notice the path that the .ini file is in. That’s right, it is called Cooked. Maybe it is the normal name, but when I see that, it makes me think of someone “cooking the books” or manipulating something. May have been a funny joke, but I was not laughing.

Next I tried to take a screen print while I was playing, and when I pasted it into Photoshop, I got the first confirmed proof I was not running at my LCD’s native resolution. Yep, the screen capture came out to 1024×768. So basically, Midway did not want my machine to run any higher than that resolution when it came to playing the demo. Can’t change the graphic options in the game, so I looked at the .ini some more.

Lastly, and what I could be wrong on, but I am pretty sure as I have mucked around in an Unreal .ini file on more than one occasion, was the entry, “MinDesiredFrameRate=35.000000″. This basically tells the game that you want to get a minimum frame rate of 35 frames per second. So the game adjusts the details accordingly to get to that point. That is why the game was running at 1024×768. Further evidence can be gleaned a couple lines below that. The entries, “StartupResolutionX=1280″ and “StartupResolutionY=720″, tell me that the game starts up at the following resolution, but will adjust as needed to fit the previous mentioned desired frame rate.

Now I started toying around with these settings, but anything that deviated from these settings crashed the demo on my machine. I cannot confirm that will happen to anyone else, but I did find it interesting that I could not change any of the settings beyond the default settings. Maybe our readers can try it out and see if they have better success than I did.

So thank you Midway, for giving me a Stranglehold Demo that had rose colored glasses on it. I know you want to make the game look like a speed demon on the PC, but did you have to go this far to make it look good. It would be better to give PC gamers options rather than fix it to look good right now. All that will do is get PC gamers more irritated when they get the full game home, pump up the details and get a slide show instead of the nice flowing graphics you are giving us now.

UPDATED: As some readers pointed out, the “MinDesiredFrameRate” entry is in all Unreal Engine default .ini files, so this does not affect the game resolution as originally thought.