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

So the new Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles game for PSP is very pretty and it sounds really great. The music is nice, and the sound effects are well done. Each secondary weapon is surprisingly well animated. But I think the Belmont hero’s name should be Rondo, as in Rondo of Blood, as in after 2 hours of playing this game all I’m still good at helping him do is bleed when hit, then die in a spray of blood. I’m talking about the difficulty level of this game. Before they put a fresh coat of paint on this classic razor-edged gem Konami made sure to put blue painter’s tape over the extraordinary difficulty of the original game so that once all the pretty graphics and sounds were done they could carefully tear off the tape and have a beautiful game that is fiendishly hard.

Here’s what our Bloodsplosive Belmont is good at doing:

Dying instantly by falling in water.
Losing painful chunks of health by being pecked by a bird.

And here’s what he can’t do:

Block anything.
Whip anywhere but left or right.
Move at anything faster than a walk.

Do any of these get helped later in the game? If they do, I’d probably not live long enough to ever see it. I was so bad at this game that after these two hours spent trying to unlock the Symphony Of The Night game by following some specific Kotaku instructions for doing so I still wasn’t able to do it. So I give up, and back it goes to be rented by someone who can no doubt appreciate it more than I can.