Playdate

[shinymcshine]

I really do love the breadth of the hobby, where it encompasses things like Playdate, and (as featured monthly in Retro gamer) people still making new content for computers & consoles of yesteryear, on one end, then people getting hyped for PS5 Pro (well, I'm sure some are) and it's enhanced cutting edge visuals etc on the other.

[DANGERMAN]

I'll have to give chicken mode a try. I've managed to get past the 1st boss on normal but that's it 

[Maryokutai]

It's really substantially easier, I got to the last boss on my first try which would never have happened on the default setting.

 

@shinymcshine yeah, and I think it's also reassuring to see that at the end of the day, no matter how shitty the big houses handle things, that it's still a creative medium and some people will always find joy in making something and find a way to make it accessible to an audience, with or without a publisher.

[spatular]

I still sort of hate this due to the charging situation. But did buy my first game on it, the train one, zero zero, only had a quick go but does seem like a good clone of densha de go, not many routes but to be expected for a fiver.

 

https://play.date/games/zero-zero/

[Maryokutai]

I have that on my wishlist. Not quite my genre but it looks really nice.

 

So far I haven't had any battery issues with it, but I did notice that downloading and installing games drains it fast. Very noticeable when I come home on Mondays after the two 'free' games got added. That said it does bother me a bit that you can't just turn it off, I don't like hardware being permanently active.

[Maryokutai]

Saw the other day that there's quite a few games on sale at the moment. Just a heads up if you happen to have some stuff on your wishlist, might want to check if they're discounted. 

[Maryokutai]

I picked up three games on the sale: 10-Day Champion, MDMA and Dolphin Splash.

 

10-Day Champion is a mini-RPG in which you have ten days to get ready for a tournament. Preparing for it means fighting enemies, working to earn money, using XP and money to acquire skills and equipment etc. Everything is presented via background images and text, but battles are a bit more visualised and through its nice soundtrack it does evoke a certain atmosphere. There's no save states, so if you die towards the latter part you have to start all over again, which feels a bit deflating considering you have to rebuild your character from scratch again. I think it's because of this last part that I won't stick with it for too long, but I do want to see it through with at least one of the characters.

 

 

Mega Dystopia Micro Architect (MDMA) I think came out relatively early in the system's lifespan. It looks like a city builder, but it's actually closer to something like Carcassone. You have a deck with blueprints of certain building types that you then can freely place on a grid. Buildings either increase or decrease your point total depending on what you put them next to and at certain point thresholds you can pick a modifier like increasing the grid size or adding more blueprints to your current deck. Every time you play you receive some points you can then spend to start off with a larger grid, more blueprints etc. to make longer plays possible. While this is technically a roguelike feature, the game itself doesn't really feel like one and has more in common with classic highscore puzzle games like Tetris. Really enjoying this one, nice soundtrack here, too.

 

 

Dolphin Splash! I've only just tried out, but it's a 2D arcade game in which you control a dolphin with the crank. Wiggling it makes you go a bit faster, but otherwise it's rather straightforward and each level seems to mix things up a bit (collect all the thingies, beat the time limit etc.). It's pretty cute and probably the first time since Ecco that I've seen a Dolphin being the hero of a game. I've not yet entirely gotten used to the controls, but the first impression is pretty good. Some nice parallax scrolling going on in the background, too.

 

[Maryokutai]

So I did end up beating 10-Day Champion with the mage character and I played around a bit with the other two I have unlocked. I think it's a cool game, but I wish it had a permanent save feature, even if it meant risking running into a dead end, skillset-wise.

 

Anyway, I recently got a new game, called Trackminia. Considering UbiSoft doesn't have any money anymore they're probably safe from any lawsuits. I actually never really played Trackmania, so I can't comment on how similar they are, but the developer does cite the series as a big influence. In this one you drive around flat courses with different backgrounds and try to drift masterfully through corners to beat target times (it's only time trials, there are no races with multiple cars - what you see in the gif are ghosts). There's quite a steep learning curve to handling the drift, which feels like a more loose version of Ridge Racer gameplay, but after a while you'll get a handle on things. I'm at a point now where I can sort of challenge the Silver times, but Gold is still very much out of reach, even on the very first course. Visually I find it quite impressive (it looks better natively than here in the gif, the dithering isn't as pronounced without a backlit screen) and there's even a track builder in there. I know @spatular doesn't exactly love the Playdate but this might be one you'd enjoy.

 

[mfnick]

Love the look of that! 

[spatular]

Yeah that does look cool, thanks for the heads up!

[Maryokutai]

Don't know if you guys saw but there's a huge sale going on at the moment in the shop: https://play.date/games/tags/catalog-anniversary-sale-2025/

 

Trying not to spend too much so I only picked up one game, Castle Tintagel, a homage to classic Castlevania games featuring characters from the Arthurian saga. Looks nice enough, only played it for a few minutes so far though.

 

[DANGERMAN]

Late replying but that does look good 

[Maryokutai]

They just gave a couple more details about Season 2: https://play.date/games/seasons/two/

Or here in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4faUwfDw5o

 

In the video they show off four games in a bit more detail, the first two I found most interesting as they're made by the people behind Into the Breach and Argo respectively. The former is some kind of mix between tower defense and shoot'em up, not unlike Orbo but more complex in its systems. I didn't like Into the Breach very much but this looked quite nice. The second one is a puzzle game where you play as a Dingo archaeologist. Quite the departure from Argo's serious themes but very cute art style.

 

The season starts at the end of May and consists of 12 games for 40 bucks. Which is where certain questions arise, because while the first Season was a nice bundled-in package, it's a different scenario when you ask people to pay for games they might not end up enjoying. It's not about the price – 40 for 12 games is absolutely fair – but what if I only want half of them? I get why they're doing it, as it adds to the quirkiness of the system and I'm buying it because I overall just like what they're doing, but it's something I might mention the next time they send a survey. Maybe have the season at a discount but allow single purchases in the future, or something like that – to reward early 'cat in the bag' adopters but give everyone else the opportunity to pick and choose.

 

---

 

Also, regarding the game above, I still haven't really played it. The reason for that being that a day after posting I was weak again and bought Spilled Mushrooms on sale, which, and I'm not exaggerating, is such an excellent game that I haven't touched anything on the system since. It's a puzzle game with cards, basically, where you are confronted with three different landscapes with certain numerical values (= number of mushrooms) that the cards you're holding in your hand then have to collect (= animals holding baskets). Animals act in turns depending on a second stat number and have unique effects. It's a bit difficult to explain in words and it looks weird on screenshots, but it's quite easy to grasp and has a lot of depth and tons of content (= unlockable landscapes and animals, which influence the randomised matches).

 

[Maryokutai]

Just a quick heads up, they recently pushed out an update that paves the way for multiplayer features (kind of cool). But unfortunately it also makes the system super unstable and for some reason drains the battery extremely quickly (mine's now empty after 24h in standby). So maybe hold off installing it for the moment.

[retroed]

This game looks awesome.

 

 

 

 

[Maryokutai]

IIRC this is one of the first two games of Season 2, so technically it should be installed on my system when I get home. I'll probably try it out over the weekend (the other one is that archeological puzzle game which also looks nice).

 

Also, quick update regarding my last post: they pushed out another firmware update recently and that seems to have solved the issues, haven't had any crashes since and battery life seems normal again.

[Maryokutai]

I tried the first two, well, two and a half, games from Season 2. Dig Dig Dino! is actually not a puzzle game at all despite looking like one. You pretty much just get tossed in a level and then have to dig until you find something of value or run out of moves. Finding skeletons moves the 'plot' forward by unlocking new dig areas and expanding the encyclopedia. Non-bones you find fill up your pockets which allow you to upgrade your tools to make digging easier/faster. I guess if you want to be mean you could call it a non-game and it wouldn't technically be wrong, but it's alright as a little distraction and in that sense perfectly suited for the device.

 

 

The polar opposite of that is Fulcrum Defender, kind of the 2.0 version of Orbo. You're fighting off incoming enemies by aiming your gun from a central position via the crank, in regular intervals you level up and strengthen your weapon systems as well as unlocking secondary weapons, which then make the dispatching of enemies easier. The goal is to survive for ten minutes, but I played two runs so far (Easy and Normal) and made it way past that point without issue. Which brings me to the game's problem: it just goes on for too long. My normal run took well over 20 minutes which I think is too long for a little arcade shooting game on the Playdate, especially as it also takes a whle to really get going through unlocking upgrades. So while it is, from a design standpoint, superior to Dig Dig Dino, I think it's just ill-suited to the format. There's also only local leaderboards, so no real reason to return to it.

 

 

And then the 'and-a-half game', Blippo+. This one I can safely call 'not a game' without any kind of ill will, because it is ultimately just a tiny TV function with fake channels. I only dabbled for a few minutes, but you can find stuff like science news or a sitcom-style little sketch. It's cool to see these FMVs on the small screen, but this is very much just a little artsy experiment some people will get really into as a meta puzzle, but I'm more likely to boot it up maybe once more and then move on.

 

 

So far, so good. Not a system seller in there yet, but I've enjoyed my time with them so far and will continue going back to Dig Dig Dino until I have unlocked everything for sure.

[Maryokutai]

Quick update, that Blippo+ thingy that works like a fake TV channel actually gets updated every week. It's still not for me, but just to rectify that information.

 

I finally found some time to go back through the last S2 releases. The last week wasn't particularly interesting for me, CatchaDiablos ist some kind of monster collecting roguelike, but I found the controls rather unintuitive (you move around the circomferance of tiny circles that double as catching tools). While Shadowgate PD is a classic fantasy (text) adventure that will no doubt find its fans, but it's not my genre and moving the curser with the D-Pad is a tad finnicky.

 

The week before that they released Long Puppy which could have been a Keita Takahashi game. You play as a dog who has to eat foodstuff hidden around the stage to grow long enough so that you can reach the ball your owner always throws too far away. Your highscore at the end gets measured by the size of the dog's poo. This was another one where I didn't quite like the controls (if you extend the dog and there's no ground to stand on, you have to manually retract). It's alright overall and the dumb humour has its charm, but I doubt I'll revisit it.

 

Now the other three thankfully were more my cup of tea and I've spend a bit of time with each of them. First off is Otto's Galactic Groove!!, which is fundamentally a very run-of-the-mill rhythm game I'm surprised hasn't been made for the system yet. It plays a bit like the field stages from the FF Theatrhythm games, as you use the crank to align a cursor and the press any button as the notes pass through. The music isn't particularly great, as expected, but it's a nice diversion and has some crudely drawn but cute story segments.

 

 

Week two had The Whiteout, a rather classic point & click – or in this case walk & press button – adventure. This one I need to spend a bit more time with but initial impressions are rather positive and it develops a strong sense of atmosphere despite the system's low-fi nature. The gist of it is that you run around a desolate winter landscape and have to figure stuff out, that's about as far as I've gotten, but the plan is to see this one through for sure.

 

 

And finally, there's Wheelsprung, which is basically just Trials, but instead of a human on a bike you control a squirrel (a red one? We'll never know) on a toy bike. But everything else is there, the reliable physics, the devilish difficulty curve and it even has a track editor (though not as part of the game, but browser-based). Not sure if I'll ever see this to completion because I kind of like my Playdate and really wouldn't want to throw it out the window, but it's as good as you can reasonably expect a Trials-like to be on the system.

 

 

[Maryokutai]

I'm still using this little thing regularly, one thing I recently found out is that you can actually turn it off now by holding the power button for a bit. I'm not sure if that's a recent addition or if it's been there for a while, but still really welcome. They've also added folders, which I haven't really used but I always see people asking for these things. And there's been a lot of game releases recently, among these the majority of the Season 2 games which can now be purchased individually. There's also a sale going on at the moment with quite a lot of games discounterd (I picked up Agent, which is visually super impressive – haven't tried it yet though).

 

One title I want to highlight that I recently picked up is ArtilleRoyality. It's a card/puzzle game based on a game called Gridcannon, which I wasn't aware of beforehand. It consists of laying out playing cards in a 3x3 grid and using the numerical values of these cards to destroy Jacks, Queens and Kings you played at the edges outside the grid. There's more to it of course but both typing and reading card game explanations isn't fun so I'll leave it at this little summary. Unlike a lot of Playdate games, it feels like a very complete product, too – this isn't a dig towards other games, but it's very unusual to have a gallery, statistics, a shop, customisation elements for your cards etc. Which, in addition to the solid game foundation, is a good motivator to go back to it. The slightly bloodthirsty bunny girl that comments on your gameplay is quite funny, too.