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

I can’t even legitimately do a First Thirty for this one, because I just had to force myself away from an uninterrupted four-hour jag on it. And with only 15% on the completion clock.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a triumph (he declares after one night!) This is a solid, polished experience that will be the new super-hero game standard. I can’t come up with any real gripes about my first four hours with the game, except that I feel it errs on the Legend of Zelda side of easiness. IE, on the medium difficulty, I’m really not dying all that much. Yet. But when a game provides so much to do, and lies so lush with details, I’ll happily not care about that.

Arkham manages to dovetail two pursuits that often appear mutually exclusive: linear storytelling and free-roaming gameplay. Example: I just finished a fairly straight-forward jaunt through a maze-like decrepit building with some specific set tasks, followed by a boss fight (You have to hit him three times! It’s like a Sonic boss!) But instead of forever locking me out of that building, it sits there empty so I can go back in at any time to search for unlockables and other secrets. With a nod to Metroid, some hidden elements require equipment upgrades that I have yet to find.

Fighting is a hoot, thanks to a dizzying assortment of combat animations. The environments are stellar. The art design combines comic-Batman and film-Batman with the voices of cartoon-Batman to create a new vision of the Bat-mythos. The game is helpful when it needs to be. The game is smart when it needs to be (Batman spends a lot of time kicking out vent grates as he explores air conditioning ducts. But when the game knows the situation calls for quiet, it instead has Batman carefully remove the grate by hand.) On the PS3 side, we already have the Joker as a playable character in the bite-size challenge bonus levels… and the game overtly promises that more free DLC is on the way.

If you thought Ghostbusters was a good licensed game, you can forget that. Ghostbusters is phoned-in trash compared to Batman: Arkham Asylum. We don’t even need to qualify this one as “being good for a licensed game.” It’s a great game, period.