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

My first evening with my rental of Burnout Paradise on PS3 was spent entirely offline. I crashed through specially marked gates, jumped through Burnout billboards, ran races, snapped opponents like mere twigs in road rages, and chased down the special cars in sudden fits of surprisingly addictive aggression. It’s a very slick package and the time really seemed to fly by, ending up with 7% complete after 1.5 hours and 5 cars unlocked. The time really seemed to fly by, the DJ wasn’t annoying at all unlike in the demo, and they paced his delivery of helpful tips very well so that even after the first hour he was still giving me new tips on game features.

One thing I noticed was that the several roads on the western half of the map, at least, had no crash records at all. This was late Saturday night after the game hit stores probably on Wednesday, and there were still stretches of roads without a single record set online?

When first starting up the game it immediately downloaded a 1.10 day-one patch for the game, and when I went to the EA news section it thanked me for applying the patch — I never had a choice, but that’s fine by me — and explained it was created with Sony’s help to help keep people with restrictive firewall configurations playing smoothly online. The news post was also very gracious overall, thanking the almost-2 million players of the demo, encouraging players to explore the world because “it’s your game”, play it however you want. It was also very, very clear that they’ll be announcing downloadable content soon.

It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming, be it more cars, more events, or whatever stapled on top of the very large and attractive map, but to see it brightly highlighted in the very first news posting on the in-game news service is a bit unsettling. I’m reminded of the old Ginsu knife commercials showing people cutting through tin cans with them, getting an extra paring knife or some such, and then the voiceover kicks in: “And NOW how much would you pay?”

Maybe we just bought this game. Please don’t immediately tell us we have more to pay to play all of it.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.