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

For developers, shorter time to market means it costs less to produce something. Hideo Kojima’s latest Metal Gear game, the PSP-exclusive Peace Walker, apparently only took one year to develop, with another year involved for working on the voice talent and a vacation the team took after wrapping up MGS4. This short of a development effort means Peace Walker was probably ridiculously cheap to make compared to something like MGS4, especially when you consider they capitalized on the strengths of the MGS4-tested development team and may have been able to re-use some of their assets. Given the timeline of the game being set after MGS3, it could very well be that they were able to downsize the PS2 game’s assets for use in this one, further saving themselves the massive outlay of remaking high definition versions of those assets in a PS3 game.

Add in that Famitsu has given the game a perfect 40 score in Japan and you have a recipe for a quality game from Konami. What this doesn’t tell you is how badly the game will be pirated since this is the PSP, after all. And while greatly reduced development costs might be able to blunt the effects of that, I predict it won’t be a hugely successful game in the US.

One thing I can tell you is that the game looks gorgeous in the trailers and screens shown off so far. Kojima’s team is poised to deliver a beautiful game on the system. Whether I’ll be able to stomach the lack of a second analog stick and second set of shoulder buttons to play it is another matter entirely. I suspect I’ll want to re-buy MSG Portable Ops first before I go anywhere near Peace Walker, so it’ll be a while after it’s June 8th launch date. Check out the trailer below from the PlayStation Blog.