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

You are correct, last week I didn’t tell you what I played over the weekend, but I have an excuse! I was on vacation with my family. It wasn’t far from home, and once I saw the place we’d be staying had WiFi I happily carted along my laptop so I could spend evenings playing EVE Online watching over my sleeping youngest daughter while the wife took my older kids out for more summer fun.

Once I got there, however, I found the service to be terribly slow. A quick speedtest put the bandwidth at 0.5 megabits down and 0.2 megabits upload at best with a 200+ms ping time to the test server. Yucko. If it’s one thing an MMO needs it’s bandwidth, but it turns out that EVE Online, at any rate, can get by pretty well with low-end service.

The EVE client performed admirably, albeit with significant multi-second lag time when executing ship commands and longer lags when docking and undocking. This led me to keep my ships out of harm’s way for most of the trip, opting to mine asteroids while perusing the in-game market and reading up on skills. So thin was the internet pipe that I couldn’t even surf the web while I played – there just wasn’t enough data making it through to me.

Returning home and hooking back up to the LAN was like a blast of wonderfully fresh air. I celebrated by squaring off against AI opponents in a few missions and letting slip the dogs of war, turning my enemies into hunks of smoldering metal! And then I had to go take out the trash.

What kinds of gaming adventures have you had on vacation? Do you travel light or do you try to bring your living-room consoles with you?