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

Tycho on Penny-Arcade has fallen back into the treadmill-loot abyss of World of Warcraft and in today’s post outlines just why Dungeons and Dragons Online‘s rollout of new content is just as uncompelling as their main game:

The reality is that … [D&DO] would have to be better than WoW to succeed, now. … With a head start, years of steady improvements, premium upgrades, world-class art and design, and hundreds of millions of dollars, Blizzard is an entrenched foe. They have a “next generation MMO” in the pipeline, but my guess would be that it’s a graphical update to the existing world.

I wouldn’t be too sure about next-gen being a coat of paint on the existing game. Common sense doesn’t reign supreme in these games. Someone thought Everquest II being a different game than Everquest was a great idea.

Tycho’s other comments about grinding certain creatures for quest items reminds me of last-generation’s retelling of The Bard’s Tale from InXile, which I spent some time with a while ago. One of the first creatures you slay in The Bard’s Tale is a wolf which drops items it clearly couldn’t be carrying along with a piece of furniture as well — a chair if memory serves. The sarcastic narrator (the late Tony Jay) stops to ask if the item list is correct before mentioning the chair.

Tycho wrote:
I needed ten skins, and apparently these were some kind of [expletive] Yeti with no [expletive] skin on them. … Oh, now here is a gourmet Yeti, one with a Roasted Quail, but no pelt.

Source: Penny Arcade, image from Thottbot.