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

Microsoft’s latest and greatest OS has launched and Apple’s latest ad reminds us to take the general praise from pundits with a grain of salt. We’ve been here before. We’ve heard a lot of things about how this time it’s going to work better, run more smoothly, and so on. But in the end Windows is complex, it’s a patchwork of systems that are integrated to varying degrees, written by so many engineers — or people who I hope are engineers anyway — and tested by various testers and programs of varying skill — that it’s going to have problems. Big problems. They might not appear right away, but they’re coming, and it’ll take a Service Pack or two to iron them out, and then new ones will take their place.

It’s going to break games. Some small games, some big games, some games whose publishers won’t care enough to patch them. Some publishers who won’t be able to afford to patch them. Some publishers who no longer exist to even try to patch them. Such is the fate of gaming on Windows — some software will not run exactly the way it did on previous versions.

I don’t delight in shining a cold light on Windows 7 like this — frankly I wish it did do everything incredibly well, solved world hunger, and brokered world peace — but really, we’ve been down this road before, and the story never really changes. The bottom line isn’t the reviews and praise you hear from the press about the OS today, it’s about seeing how it does over the next year or more up against a plethora of hardware options and game software on those configurations. In other words, the jury is still out.