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

The age-old Elite and X series (X-BTF, X2 and X3) all dropped you into the cockpit of a one-man spacecraft with varying upgrade options and one or more galaxies at your feet to fly around, trade in, and shoot bad guys in. If that’s not enough complexity for you, you have the big X2 and X3 economies to paddle around in where you can buy and control entire factory stations and supply chains. Is that not enough for you? Consider the Battlecruiser series, then. While not as economically advanced as the X series or the MMO EVE Online, the Battlecruiser games put you at the helm of a very large starship complete with a crew to command, enemy ships to conquer or destroy, and planets to explore. If the game runs, that is.

The fifth game in the Battlecruiser series, originally called Battlecruiser Generations, was released as Universal Combat in 2004 and has now been released as freeware by the developer in a fully patched, single-player-only form minus a few music tracks.

The last time I played a Battlecruiser game was before this release and for me the hallmark of the series was the vast promise held out by Smart’s vision of the ultimate open-ended space sim. There were menu options in the game for just about every last thing you’d want to do with a starship or craft, and back then many of them didn’t work and probably would never work. This didn’t keep Smart and his team from dreaming big and building it better next time, so how does Universal Combat do?

IGN gave it a 5.9, calling it a skyscraper built by hand, giving it a pretty fair shake with a mediocre score and poor graphics for its time. My own few minutes with this version of the game tells me that if you’ve played X2 you’re in for a shock.

I first discovered the Battlecruiser series as a shiny, silver-boxed Battlecruiser 2000 (or was it 3000?) what seems like eons ago at a computer show in town. I paid next to nothing for it, took it home, and proceeded to fight to get it running. I failed, went online, and found the first patch for the game along with a long story of how the publisher had shoved the boxed game out the door before it was even finished (something I’d never heard of back then) and got it up and running. The online community for the game was unusually rabid and dedicated led by a very controversial and dedicated leader, Derek Smart, who had basically dreamed up and almost singlehandedly programmed every game in the series.

While this new version runs immediately thanks to the latest patch being applied, after getting involved in X2′s simulation (even with its laughable plot) trying to navigate Universal Combat is like going backwards in time. If Egosoft manages to streamline and test the user interface for whatever comes after X3, I’ll be sorely tempted to pick that game up but I’m not willing to go backwards from what I’ve gotten in X2 to something like Universal Combat.

Sources: StrategyInformer and IGN.