(You can connect it up to a PC to play through a monitor but that defeats the whole point of it being portable.) It’s a very nice piece of hardware but with one intractable problem: the screen is not backlit and needs a light source shining on it for you to be able to see it properly. The Playdate also has motion controls, although very few games use the feature, and an impressively loud speaker, given its small size. We never felt the hardware let us down though, even as we were trying to wrap our head around playing a Breakout clone with a paddle that can rotate around the whole screen. We have to admit, we were expecting the crank to feel a little more tactile and crunchy than it does, but it is surprisingly precise, with many of the action games requiring you to be very accurate in unusual ways. Sometimes it’s merely a novelty and sometimes it’s an intrinsic part of the control system, such as one game where you’re trying to draw circles round collectible objects and another where you’re rotating an eyeball through maze-like puzzles. The crank on the side is used by the majority of the games but for a wide variety of purposes. In terms of the device itself, the Playdate has a black and white screen, two action buttons, and a D-pad. We’ll review each of them in brief below, but we really would caution reading up too much about them, as that does risk spoiling the appeal of the whole concept. That is quite the novelty, as it’s impossible to predict what each game might be, with those in the first season ranging from simple puzzle and action games to more complex narrative led titles, turn-based strategies, and Zelda style adventures. We’ve described them all below but in a way that is a spoiler, as part of the appeal is getting a new game out of the blue and booting it up for the first time. We’ve been sent them all at once, along with the console itself, and it sure is something different.Īs you might guess, the games in question do not include the latest Call Of Duty, or anything approaching a big name game, but are instead exclusive indie titles made specifically to take advantage of the Playdate. You don’t buy the games separately but instead get a ‘season’ of 24 titles that are delivered at a rate of two per week. There isn’t any way to explain this that is going to seem sensible, but Playdate is a portable console, the size of a beermat, with a black and white screen and a crank on the side that is used to control some, but not all, of its games. GameCentral reviews the new indie-powered portable console whose main selling point is that you can control its games with a crank. Pro tip: don’t play this on a date (pic: Panic)
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