Google Play Store Link

Tiny Diggers
Tiny Diggers is an educational kid’s game by TouchTilt Games. You choose from an Excavator, Dumptruck and a Bulldozer and learn about shapes, numbers and colors. It has great reviews and my own 3-year old son can’t get enough of it. Here are the details plus a trailer:

✓ 3 different trucks to control
✓ 3 different games that teach kids about numbers, colours and shapes
✓ Free Play Mode – just dig, dump dirt and explore!
✓ Interactive environments
✓ Animated characters and dozens of sounds throughout the game
✓ No confusing menus or navigation

▸ GAMES
✓ Numbers: Drive an excavator and dig anywhere, then dump dirt on the number shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Colors: Drive a Dumptruck and dump dirt on the colour shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Shapes: Drive a Bulldozer and push dirt to the shape shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Free Play Mode: Choose your truck and explore with no objectives.

Google Play Store Link

1. Tiny Diggers
The first one is Tiny Diggers and it’s an educational kid’s game by TouchTilt Games. You choose from an Excavator, Dumptruck and a Bulldozer and learn about shapes, numbers and colors. It has great reviews and my own 3-year old son can’t get enough of it. Here are the details plus a trailer:

APP STORE LINK

✓ 3 different trucks to control
✓ 3 different games that teach kids about numbers, colours and shapes
✓ Free Play Mode – just dig, dump dirt and explore!
✓ Interactive environments
✓ Animated characters and dozens of sounds throughout the game
✓ No confusing menus or navigation

▸ GAMES
✓ Numbers: Drive an excavator and dig anywhere, then dump dirt on the number shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Colors: Drive a Dumptruck and dump dirt on the colour shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Shapes: Drive a Bulldozer and push dirt to the shape shown above the truck to progress.
✓ Free Play Mode: Choose your truck and explore with no objectives.

2. Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus
In Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus you have the opportunity to drive a School bus down the street, pick up children and learn about letters, letter sounds and words. You then learn more about the letters you picked up inside the bus followed by dropping the kids off at school. The letters are random when you start a new game and has other game modes too. Here are a few details on Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus as well as a trailer:

APP STORE LINK

Game modes include:
Show & Tell – Teaches the child word association with objects and letters by sounding out the first letter and then naming each object. Focus is on short vowels and consonant sounds.

Letter Search – Teaches the child to recoginize each letter of the alphabet and the sound it makes. Focus is on short vowels and consonant sounds.
Pick up kids and learn random letters from A-Z, then drop them off at school.
Show & Tell with letters
Word and letter sounds
Object association
Letter Search with letter sounds

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The variety of templates the DBA team has compiled is incredibly comprehensive. So if you have an idea to build the next Angry Birds – check out there Angry Birds Template – again, as are all the templates, it’s amazing, with most of the coding and subtle dynamics of the original game re-created for you to pick up and use from the Template. To use any of the templates, you simply purchase from the DeepBlueApps website, open up in GameSalad and Press Play! It’s that simple

The DeepBlueApps team have also produced some other non game related templates, like fully featured sound board templates and even a Painting and Drawing template app, that lets you record audio, paint on various canvases and save your work to the Photo Library. As always, these templates are simple, pick up, change and use – for your own purposes.

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- GameSalad Templates
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- Animation and Art Packs
- Music & SFX audio files and kits
- Dozens of FREE demo and example templates

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From the creator of the successful iPad and iPhone game Tiny Diggers comes a new educational adventure called Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus!

The vibrant and exciting new iOS game from TouchTilt Games called Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus hits the iPad with Retina display graphics, easy Gamecenter Achievements for kids and ample Schoolbus driving.

Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus is an entertaining way for your child to learn letter sounds and words while taking the driver’s seat of a Schoolbus on the way to school. Pick up and interact with kids, learn random letters from A-Z and then drop them off at school all while enjoying the bumpy ride to school. Game modes include: Show & Tell with letters, word and letter sounds and object association. Additionally you can choose Letter Search with letter sounds.

“Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus evolved from the success of Tiny Diggers in which you operate construction trucks while learning letters, numbers and shapes” says Shane Whitehouse of TouchTilt Games. “Kids 5+ love the whole schoolbus experience. I wanted to create a new driving game that gives them the feeling like they’re in control of this big, bright yellow truck and having fun while learning at the same time. As with the response from Parents and Tiny Diggers, I look forward to receiving new photos and videos of kid’s playing Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus on the iPad.”

In Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus, aimed at kids aged 2-6, players get the choice of picking a boy or girl to drive the bus with a heavy emphasis on entertainment. The primary goal is to learn letter sounds, object association and words but the emphasis is to take to the streets in your bright, yellow schoolbus that the player drives. Players can pick up kids on the street waiting for the bus, interact with the schoolbus doors, stop sign and other interactive objects along the way. You can even stop traffic when the schoolbus stop sign is up! Then when you’ve filled the bus with kids, head inside the bus for more interactivity; touching objects and letters until the bus reaches the school. Finally, drop the kids off at school and replay the level with different letters.

Features & Game Modes Include:
• Show & Tell with letters
• Word and letter sounds
• Object association
• Letter Search with letter sounds
Animated characters and dozens of sounds
Easy Gamecenter Achievements for kids
iPad 3 Retina graphics
• No confusing menus or navigation
Professional soundtrack by Hessel Van Hoorn

Tiny Drivers: Schoolbus compliments TouchTilt Games’ educational portfolio of titles for kids who enjoy learning on the iPad. The imaginative artwork is bright and colourful with sleek animation and backgrounds. You immediately forget your child is engaged in education. 

App Store Link

I’m a big fan of Criterion’s work on Burnout Paradise, and am looking forward to giving this game a spin. It looks like they’ve got another intense, thrilling drive on their hands.

Source: EA press release, more info at the site.

On Friday night, I played To The Moon. Perhaps more accurately, I should say To The Moon played me. Well written, astonishingly well scored, and equal parts funny, charming, and heartbreaking, this game hits hard, and hits deep. This is because despite its far fetched premise, the characters are shockingly believable, human, and likeable. I can’t help but imagine these characters must really exist as real people somewhere.

If you care about narrative in games, you have to play this.

The playable characters are the two doctors, Eva Rosaline and Neil Watts. They work for Sigmund Life Generation, a company that grants dying wishes to their clients. This is a matter of visiting the dying person and using a machine to edit their memory of their life, so that they can believe in their last moments that they have lived out whatever particular fantasy they request. The patient in this episode (the developer has recently announced an upcoming second episode) is a widower named John who wants to go to the moon, but he doesn’t know why. This creates a problem for Eva and Neil, who need to know why so they can do the edit. Determined to find clues, they proceed to work their way backward, searching through virtual copies of the man’s memories, unraveling the mysteries surrounding the man’s late wife, their marriage, courtship, and eventually his childhood by leaping through various mementos. Throughout this journey, Eva and Neil have some really funny and believable dialog, including frequent pop culture references (mostly by Neil) and almost as frequent insults (mostly by Eva). Some, I’ve read, seem to find these a bit over the top, but I thought they did an excellent job of keeping a game that tends to really trigger tears from coming across as manipulative. It feels very well balanced.

Graphically, it resembles a Super NES RPG, perhaps no game moreso than Chrono Trigger. However, it’s not really an RPG in the most traditional sense; it’s more of a work of interactive fiction with some point and click adventure elements. But what’s key here is the story, which is told with painstaking care and taste, never insulting the player or talking down to them. The pacing is very solid, as the whole story arc takes place over less than four hours of gameplay. The music is phenomenally good, suiting things exactly right and lending additional impact to the emotions triggered by the game. The lion’s share of the music is composed by the developer, Kan Gao. A couple of the tracks feature Laura Shigihara, best known for singing the Zombies on Your Lawn ending song from Plants vs Zombies.

In fact, taken for what it is, the game is nearly perfect, and to my memory, pretty damned unique.

Nearly perfect, that is, except for some small issues. The point and click controls are kind of strange, in that pathfinding can be unpredictable, and some items can be tough to interact with, requiring moving your characters away and then back again. The pointer sometimes doesn’t line up exactly with objects, meaning if they’re close together, it’s not hard to hit the wrong one, though this rarely happens. There are spelling errors and awkward grammatical phrases in the game. Finally, there is a sequence near the end of the game that should simply not have been there, because it controls terribly, is very frustrating, and adds nothing to the story. The worst of these problems is the last, and it’s over pretty quickly, and does not make the game any less of a recommend for purchase. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $8, or $10 with a superb 33-track downloadable soundtrack. Unfortunately, the Steam overlay and screenshot systems do not currently work with this game.

My first thought was that this game doesn’t have much replay value, but that thought was incorrect. My second playthrough has me looking at events in a whole different perspective, now that I know where it’s all going. For a game this linear, that is quite an accomplishment.

Freebird offers a free one hour demo of this game on their website. If you’re not sold, I suggest you go grab it and try it out.

Five out of five. As an experience, it is not to be missed.

I’m already planning to take the day off work.

Source: Runic Games

They’re not the ten best games in history. They’re not even the ten best games I’ve ever played. They’re the ten games that had the greatest impact on me as a gamer. I’ve even provided videos for each. Spoiler alert, Chrono Trigger is not in this list.

Forbidden Forest

Most of my earliest gaming was on the Commodore 64. One of the clearest memories I have of that time is how incredibly terrifying Paul Norman’s Forbidden Forest game was. While most of the games I played at home were pirated, I had a friend in elementary school who bought all his games, and he had a retail copy of this game. I remember it being as challenging as it was scary, but today I wonder if it would be nearly as hard if it weren’t so frightening. I’ll paste a video here, but I don’t think I have the stomach to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_fVEDE24ZY

Final Fantasy IV

I think Square has remade and rereleased Final Fantasy IV more than any of their other games, but it might be a tie with the first Final Fantasy. I first played a borrowed copy of it on Super NES, but I’ve owned it on PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Portable, and I still have the last two. While I prefer Final Fantasy VI, I think Final Fantasy IV actually means more to me because of the impact it had on me when I first played it. I had already played and beaten the first Final Fantasy on NES, but the leap from 1 to 4 (at the time I had no idea I’d missed 2 and 3 of course) was stunning. Main characters died in this game, and I was attached to them when it happened. That’s a big deal.

Metroid Prime

I still consider Metroid Prime my favorite video game of all time. I hadn’t been into a first person game with shooting since the original Quake, but I was excited to see the Metroid brand return with this high tech game anyway. I remember buying it at Target on or about launch day, my enthusiasm for it totally out of balance with my history at the time: I had never played a Metroid game, to my memory. Further, I spent $50 on it and it was down to $20 within a month or two. It took me the better part of a year, or perhaps more, to understand the game enough to progress anywhere, but once I got there, I was blown away. I have since played through a number of times, beating it on the hardest difficulty offered.

Castlevania Bloodlines

I’m a huge fan of the brand. The cool kids all pick Dracula’s Curse as their favorite Castlevania, and the young ones choose Symphony of the Night because they don’t know any better. I think mine is Order of Ecclesia, but Bloodlines is the one that had the biggest impact on me. When it came out, I was big into the Sega Genesis, and I played this game like crazy. The graphics and especially the sound were amazing for the era. This was the first Castlevania game where Michiru Yamane provided the music, and she did amazing work. To this day, it’s the songs from Bloodlines that I love the most in the series, especially Iron Blue Intention, which features in the stage below.

Toejam & Earl

Toejam & Earl was a Sega Genesis rogue like with randomly generated levels and treasure. It had a wicked sense of humor and some really amusing efforts to incorporate the developer’s understanding of what was popular with the kids those days: rap music. On the first point, the sound effects were funny and the enemies, who were often ugly and frightening caricatures of humans (particularly the Western kinds) were downright hilarious. On the second, the game even featured a mode where you could make the two protagonists rap and sing by pressing the buttons on the controller.

Grim Fandango

Tim Schaefer’s Grim Fandango is one of those games I’ve bought more than once. I got it the first time around launch, but sold it at some point on eBay for some reason. I recently picked up another boxed copy just like my original, and it set me back about $35, which I would consider a fine deal. It won’t run out of the box on modern computers, and it even had trouble on Windows XP. Fortunately there’s a modern project called Residual, which runs on modern platforms like Windows 7 and MacOS and replaces the executable and runs the game even better than the original (there were significant bugs in the final release that are fixed in this release) using the data files from the CD-ROMs. There’s even an offshoot of that project to remodel and reskin the game to make an HD version… and the original developers occasionally contribute on the forum.

Diablo II

It’s fashionable to dislike Diablo III, and guess what, I’m on that bandwagon too. I played Diablo II from launch until Diablo III came out, doing several playthroughs a year almost every year. I did two near complete plays in the months before III came out, going all the way up to Hell difficulty in one before becoming stuck, and all the way to the very end (completing Hell) in the other with my girlfriend. Diablo II had its share of bugs in the beginning too, but they didn’t make me angry the way they do in Diablo III, because the game wasn’t nearly as brutal. I don’t mind that III is online, I’m always online anyway. I hate that the game is so poorly balanced because they want people to use their Auction House, which I refuse to take part in. I know a woman who made $850 in the first week the RMAH was released, but I don’t care about that. I just want to be able to play Act II Nightmare using self found gear… and so far, I can’t. Diablo II, on the other hand, was balanced for regular play at launch (though of course it needed refinements). It wasn’t designed around something many people like myself don’t ever want to do.

Plants vs Zombies

Last night, I picked up PvZ on the Steam sale for $2.50. I already owned it through Big Fish Games on my Mac, and I got it free when it launched on Amazon’s Appstore for Android as well. But now I have it everywhere and I’m still hopelessly addicted to it. Somehow, even at its hardest, Plants vs Zombies is never frustrating. I’ve reached the point now where I play every game on easy if it can be completed on that difficulty, because I don’t want games to piss me off anymore. I mean, I gave up on Braid. So when something like PvZ comes along and gives me a challenge but doesn’t make me angry, I become hooked.

Ouendan

This is still my favorite Nintendo DS game. I imported it from Japan for $50 and I have never regretted it. I’ve beaten it on all three difficulties and had a blast the whole time. I picked up the sequels that came to the US and Japan as well, and they’re great, but they aren’t quite what the original was.

And while most of the songs were upbeat and rocking, each of the games had one that was very sad:

Mega Man 2

It wasn’t the original, and it wasn’t as refined as Mega Man 3. Still, it is my favorite Mega Man game. Unlike many of the early video games I played, I still have all the muscle memory needed to beat Mega Man 2 in less than 30 minutes. This comes from having played the game so many times start to finish that I think I have developed a lobe in my brain just for it. In fact, I haven’t dusted that off in a while. Time to go break out the NES and find myself a copy of this game.

Skype doesn’t love me.

This is the sentence I’ve typed to my girlfriend time and again as the myriad of issues in Skype for Android cause confusion in our communication.

I can credit Skype with being the primary means of communication for my relationship. The text chat is clean, attractive, intuitive, and the emoticons are fun. Unfortunately, the programmers have utterly failed to provide reliability, stability, or consistency not only of behavior, but across platforms.

Skype loses things. Messages are often lost in the ether with no indication to the intended recipient that they ever existed. I’m talking on the order of as many as a dozen or so per day, out of hundreds of messages exchanged. Yesterday I lost eight in a row, getting only the first three and last one in a long string of twelve messages. It wasn’t until I got on skype on my computer that they appeared, which defused a confusing situation that could have become very stressful.

Skype lies. I keep skype set to online at all times. However, it will at times claim I am offline while I’m conversing with someone. It will, at other times, say I’m online but will not send or receive messages. Worse still, Skype will appear in my menu bar as running and online, but it will be completely logged out. I won’t know until I go to open the task and it signs itself back on.

Skype behaves erratically. Sometimes hitting the hardware back key moves up a level in the app. Other times it hides the app like the home key, making it impossible for me to see my list of contacts, notifications, or anything else but the one conversation. When I tap skype again, it goes right back to the conversation.

Skype is unstable. I will tap a name to chat with someone, and the task will abort. I will tap the back key, and it will abort. This happens a few times a day.

Skype will doze off. In the middle of a conversation, Skype will sometimes decide it doesn’t want to work anymore. I’ll have a 4G connection, Skype will say I’m online, but no messages will send, though some may be received.

Skype forgets settings. Due to how slow and laggy the interface gets at times, I have accidentally hit the video call button. So I disabled video calling, yet it still was enabled. I went back to settings and saw it was unchecked, but still the video call option was there.

Skype video and audio calling are a disaster. If I make or receive an audio call and try to cancel, it won’t cancel. It continues to ring for several minutes. If I don’t cancel and the call picks up, I will continue to hear the ringing sound effect during the conversation for a minute or so, which is obnoxious. Video calls rarely connect or function passably, even over WiFi. When they first implemented video for my phone, it used the wrong camera and only worked in one orientation.

I feel like they don’t test the software. I have found workarounds for many of these issues. One is rebooting the phone, that rarely accomplishes anything. More often I have to uninstall skype and reinstall it to fix things. This is something I have to do once every week or two. Updating in place usually breaks the app.

The most recent versions of the app scramble message order. If I receive or even send a few messages in sequence, there’s a chance they’ll appear out of order. This makes for some very confusing conversations.

It’s an invaluable app that I use more than any other. Unfortunately, it’s crap.

One out of five. I can get very nearly the same functionality in Yahoo Messenger without any of the bugs.

As if that weren’t enough, it also contains Bastion, LIMBO (which I reviewed), Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Sword & Sworcery (which is apparently spelled that way just to annoy yours truly).

Why aren’t you already downloading this? I bought two copies, and I beat the average price (at the time, less than $8) so I got Bastion in my bundle. I also was given the Steam keys to all these games, and their digital soundtracks.

Source: PC Gamer