![]() The Playdate always restarted quickly when these things happened, and save states seemed intact. Some games also had some early bugs: I had a few freeze-up crashes, with Panic promising that updates would be coming to fix them. One baffling thing, though: There's no fishing game! How did a handheld that has a crank… have no fishing game? Sorry, I digress. Another, called b360, is like a mix of Tempest and Breakout, using the crank to rotate your paddle. ![]() One, sort of based in the Firewatch universe, called Forrest Byrnes: Up In Smoke, is a quick platforming microgame. Whitewater Wipeout, one of the first two games you'll get, is one of my favorites: simple board-spinning arcade fun. (Some of those games also have multiple save states in case you're sharing with family.) It's great to have some longer-form games, though. Other games, like Casual Birder (an RPG-like game involving snapping photos of birds and talking to people), Spellcorked (a potion-making game with various emails and reviews to sift through) and Sasquatchers (an Advance Wars-like turn-based cryptic-spotting game) have lots of story progression and text, which can be hard to read on the Playdate's small screen. Games like Snak, Hyper Meteor, Crankin's Time Travel Adventure and Battleship Godios continued that quick, addictive arcade-like feel. My kids destroyed my attempt at a high score. Games like Whitewater Wipeout, one of the first two games that pops up on the Playdate, are my favorite: the surfing/arcade game is simple, crank-controlled and addictive. While I had fun playing most of them, they do have an indie, rough-around-the-edges feel. Playing two at a time would have slowed things down and made me appreciate the games more, most likely. Getting two games a day sounds fun, but I started feeling like I was being buried in presents. I feel like I'd be spoiling things by explaining all of them, but I've played parts of all of them already a press preview version of the season accelerated the game reveals from once a week to once a day. While Panic has already announced its game lineup, details on the actual games are scarce. ![]() Part of the magic of the Panic Playdate is its gift of two games a week, which literally appear on-screen as cute wrapped packages each time they're beamed in overnight via Wi-Fi. It's a system that fits quick sessions of play.Ĭrankin's Time Travel Adventure, one of my favorite weird Playdate games. I've found that I've gotten days of use before needing a recharge, although I play in fits and spurts. The system goes to sleep instead of turning off, and displays one of three clock displays, so it becomes, literally, a game and watch. The Playdate's display is always on, like E-Ink, but with a much faster refresh rate. It seems to slot right into my sense of what games were back then, and many of the Season 1 games play with classic game design in new ways, blending arcade, RPG and puzzle formats. In my childhood summer camp days, where I'd keep a pile of Game & Watches in my bunk cubby (and later, a Game Boy), the Panic Playdate would have been welcome magic. The D-pad is slightly too creaky for my taste, though. The speaker is sharp! I've only been using the thing for a few weeks, so it's early days, but I'm impressed. The 2.7-inch, 400x240-pixel, black-and-white screen doesn't have backlighting, but it's crisp, and animations look really smooth on it. In fact, it's extremely nicely built: The plastic housing feels solid and satisfying, the crank well-made. Scott Stein/CNETīut, unlike Nintendo Labo, this Playdate is tiny and super portable and isn't made of cardboard. Or the sorts of weird ideas that sometimes come out of Nintendo. The freshness and experimental nature of the games reminds me of indie game jams, or the early days of game development on the iPhone. The lineup includes new games from Keita Takahashi (creator of Katamari Damacy), Zach Gage (maker of SpellTower and Really Bad Chess), and tons of developers and small game studios that are new to me. ![]() The games are all new, and all indie efforts. It's a gaming advent calendar in a little yellow box. The games are part of your game library once they've appeared. Instead, buying the system gets you 24 games in a "season" that will pop onto the handheld, two games at a time, once a week for 12 weeks. Panic's concept for how the Playdate works turns the concept of consoles on its head. Panic - a company best known for developing beloved indie games like Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game - never made hardware before, and the $179 Playdate feels like an impossible dream item. The Panic Playdate is the tiniest, quirkiest one of the bunch. Gaming handhelds have made a big comeback lately, with the OLED Nintendo Switch, Valve's Steam Deck, Qualcomm's push into gaming hardware with Razer, and even the Analogue Pocket.
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