What, me worry?
Handheld consoles are the best part of games, I reckon.
I love them more than any other aspect of this brilliant and difficult medium.
Handhelds take games and set them free.
It’s Mario queueing for an ice cream or waiting for an MRI.
It’s Mario slung in your backpack: where next?
And there’s a peculiar freedom of form too.
Just look at them.
The Playdate, which I’ve spent the last fortnight with, features a crank!
A lovely, playful, speculative puzzle.
What is this funny new thing particularly good at?
What makes it singular?
Where does it really come alive?
What, ultimately, is its intention?
Sometimes, design provides the perfect analogy.
There is a serious lineage to this kind of screen.
These games are great, actually.
I don’t get to see it all the time.
Like that magical, nostalgic, reflective screen, I have to angle things just so.
And then suddenly it reveals itself.
Here is what I don’t think Playdate is.
And I’m starting with this because it’s exactly what I initially assumed Playdate was going to be.
Playdate is not WarioWare: the console.
I think there is humility here in this regard.
WarioWare made its own console from rules and shifting button contexts and a flicker book of art styles.
The three-second remix of Mario 1-1?
Be generous: you might see why I thought it might be, though.
Playdate as a proposition is whimsy itself.
A uniquely self-conscious console.
Surely this is hardware from people who drink Custardos and ping around the Bay Area on unicycles with underlighting.
(Also, Pavlovians might note, the colour that McDonalds uses for the Big Mac font.)
Press it twice and the machine wakes up, one cartoon eye at a time.
There’s a menu/home button tucked rather awkwardly next to the screen, offsetting it slightly.
Oh yes, and to the side: the crank.
Pull it out - not talking about the swan anymore - and you get a little digital fanfare.
The arm of the crank is cool metal.
It’s nice to turn it, even when you’re not turning it for any reason.
When they were getting your jouncy Model Ts and Citroens purring.
When they were bringing you the latest newsreels from the REO wagons with their mounted cameras.
The in-game pause menu uses the crank too, though you’re free to also use the d-pad.
And the games themselves?
We will get to this.
That’s the rig.
So what about the games?
More importantly, it offers a piece of software called Mirror.
Mirror allows you to run Playdate on your PC or Mac and capture video.
The screen can be resized and audio can be routed to assistive audio devices.
Caveat here: a big one.
This, I suspect, is where the machine will live long term.
Homebrew but with no need for jailbreaking.
A sort of idealised PSP (with a crank).
This is an article in itself, but it is one that cannot be written yet.
So what about the games you’ll be playing now?
Buy Playdate and you get the whole season.
In principle I love that.
Switching analogies, it’s a tasting menu, I guess, albeit a protracted one.
Playing through the review period, the whole thing was sped up - two new games each day.
If you’re like me, you approach each new videogame as a chance to fall in love.
This disposition was tested by my first few days with Playdate.
It was like paging through a magazine, looking for something to read.
Helpful analogy, that.
You have no choice but to burst your own bubble.I hate and would never buy an arcade space game.
(Not me talking, I am straw-manning here for a second.
Now you’ve got one.
Give it a go.
Maybe it’s great.
Let us speak of Season One, then.
24 games, a lot of them good.
I’m not going to talk about all of them as I don’t want to spoil too much.
But there’s real diversity too: diverse creators from diverse backgrounds, and diverse ideas.
It took me a while to get over the WarioWare thing.
To crank or not to crank?
The answer, of course, is that you should follow the grain of the design.
Inventory Hero does not use the crank at all as far as I can tell.
Choose the best pants and the best sword!
Swap stuff out before it breaks!
Stop the rabbits from filling up all your inventory slots.
It’s a great game whatever you might play it on.
On Playdate it feels like something more: Permission to forget the crank?
I am going to be brisk here: DemonQuest 85 is like nothing else I have ever played.
It’s absolutely stellar.
I suppose you could argue it’s an inverse Obra Dinn, but it doesn’t feel like that.
I love it and I want to play more.
Echoic Memory is a music-matcher which, of course, has a bizarre narrative threaded through it.
Pick Pack Pup is a match-three game and satire of fulfillment center work.
All this is great, but then there’s Questy Chess.
Questy Chess is a chess-based action-adventure-puzzle game.
All as it should be!
Take it seriously - in the best, most playful way, of course.
And it’s wonderful.
That’s not all it feels like.
Playdate loves demons and space and private eyes and heaven and all the kinds of stuff Mad loved.
Again and again with Playdate I come back not to technology, but to print.
Things I could already waste hours of my life cheerfully plucking through, ink on the thumbs.
A few days back someone asked me how much storage Playdate had, and the question completely confused me.
It feels like a haunted beermat on which games occasionally appear.
What’s the battery like?
Does it have a headphone jack?
Can I make it output on a computer?
Yes, using Mirror, which also lets you use a pad.
But really, treating Playdate like technology will always feel odd to me.
Maybe there’s one way it all makes sense, though.
Games straight from someone’s attic workspace or the desk in the bedroom.
Games straight from their weird head and their weird perspective and their weird take on what games should be.
Now I’ve seen it, I want more of it.
