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

Thanksgiving is a day of football, rest from work, getting together with family and if you are lucky, maybe even some gaming. For me it was no different. I watched the Packers beat Detroit, enjoyed crawling out of bed at 9:00 AM instead of 6:00 AM, went to my in-laws house for turkey and fixings and ended up the day with the idea I was going to get some achievements in Kane and Lynch on the PC. I figured it was a great way to test out Live for Windows on XP.

Lets just say that four hours later, the experiment ended, and it has started up again today, with little sign of letting me play, as you can tell from the error message above.

I dropped Kane and Lynch in the DVD drive and went through the long install process that just seems to eat CPU cycles as it installs the game. Upon getting the notification that the game is installed, I let it launch. Live for Windows came up and registered my Gamertag, had me enter my CD-key and then brought me to the main Window of the game. The game was even smart enough to get the right desktop resolution and detail settings without me having to switch a thing. I then selected the Campaign and the first mission on Codiene (Normal) difficulty.

All I got was the first image from this story, followed by this error. So I decided to do a google search on the error, and come up with several entries that this error is occurring. I look for a patch, but to no avail. Everyone says that the error can sometimes be alt-tabbed to the background, but I was not one of the lucky few. I decided to do some research on Microsoft’s Technet and got a roundabout answer here, but nothing I could do anything about.

I start resorting to secondary measures, like turning off every secondary function that is not needed, but to no avail. The Eidos support site tried to tell me that I might have an inferior video card, but I think my two 7800GT cards in SLI are more than adequate for now. And I am running the Nvidia 169.09 drivers as Eidos recommends, but it still would not load a mission. Even downloading an nefarious No-DVD patch did not fix the problem, so it is not the copy protection. And bypassing Windows Live did not help either.

And this becomes the issue for a PC gamer. Eidos is “working” on the issue, but constantly seems to want to point to my graphics card. I told them it is in your supported list of cards, but that did not seen to convince them. And I am not the only one. I can understand that every PC is not built the same, but this error seems to be too obvious for someone to miss, and it has been registered enough on the web, that I would have to say that Eidos knows about it. Poor reviews and purchases of this game might have something to do with the poor support, but a bug like this is unforgivable. Eidos should have witnessed a bug like this long before the game shipped, but again, faced with delays and possible bad reviews, it got shipped out ot an unsuspecting public, yet again victim to the rushed deadline of the holiday buying season.

I am going to try some other fixes, but for now, I am stuck with a $50 game that I cannot play and that I cannot take back to the store due to it being open. I will update the story as it continues, but I do not sense a good end to this story.