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

February 20, 2012 – 12:39 pm | 3 Comments

Tiny Diggers has just been released on the iPad and soon the Mac computer. Here’s the details on this fun, educational game from TouchTilt Games.
Tiny Diggers Delivers Learning With Construction Trucks For Kids on the …

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Live for Windows: Providing No Value to the Consumer

Submitted by on November 4, 2007 – 11:44 pmOne Comment

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I for one have been waiting for the fruits of the labor from the Live platform coming to Windows, but so far, it has been a lost cause. We have had approximately two releases that have used the Live for Windows system and they were both on Vista removing the option to use them for most players.

So looking at this, users have been asked to pay for a $50 membership to Live for two games at this point. How does Microsoft think they can pull the wool over the eyes of so many PC players? For someone like myself, that has a Live account via my 360; it is not a big deal as I get access to both systems for the same price. But if I did not have my 360, I would be asked to pay $50 to play two games.


Yes, there are more coming out here in the near future, but unlike a 360 owner that gets value from their 360 with every game purchase, we PC players get nothing with most of our games. As a matter of fact, Steam has released more games that support Steam Achievements through the Steam community that Microsoft did through the Live service.

The only way I can see Live becoming a standard at this point is giving the PC player a discount. There is no value in the membership at this point in time. The service is half baked at this point. You have to be in a game before it is useful. No screen blades, easy way to check your friends list or even a way to look at your achievements on the fly. And the game support is atrocious. Halo 2 was decent, but try to find a good game in Shadowrun at this point. Yeah, it

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  • http://eklipse.net morphiend

    See! See! SEE! Do I even need to say I told you so? As an old skool PC gamer, I grew up with more functionality than your $50 gives you (or atleast the same).

    My first multiplayer experiences occured over dial-up between just myself and my friends. One of us would call the other and we would enjoy, DooM, DooM2, Duke Nukem, Quake, and Shadow Warrior just to name a few. How much did that support cost me? Nothing besides the cost of our phone line. Then I moved to playing Quake and Quake2 online. This was very rudimentary at first, but it was still provided for free. I had to visit sites like stompinggrounds.com to find the list of active servers. From there, a server may have link to its own site with stats! That was awesome! We got continous stats! Then came GameSpy, Half-Life. HL brought the server browser directly into the game. No extra fee, just direct access to ALL HL servers around the world, even with support to see and play the mod’s the server had enabled. Gamespy (and its other ‘clones’: All Seeing Eye, etc) ushered in the ability to have a single small application that I could use to browse all the different servers for all the different games on the internet. All of this provided at grand total of $0. World-wide statistics came about with a little game known as Battlefield 1942. IIRC, servers had the ability to dump out their stats to a main server and all the players from all over the world could see their universal standing.

    Now Microsoft has come to party and decided that it wants to make money off it. They’ve done that time and time again. Usually the feature-richness doesn’t come into play until many versions later. It’s really a shame in this case since they already did it with their other product: Xbox360. The bigger issue is that with Windows they don’t have a stranglehold over the developers to tell them how to do their on-line gaming support, where they do on the 360. This type of operation just keeps coming to surface since the consumer has repeatedly shown that they are willing to pay more and more for less and less (look at costs of “expansions” and “cheats” on Live Marketplace).