-
Panic’s Playdate is the best play date I’ve had since childhood
The aesthetic is notable, a sleek yellow device that fits in your hand and that you can hold in an even less cumbersome way than you hold your phone. Released with the kind of exclusivity and availability rate as a Nike sneaker, or more comparably, any of Analogue’s products. I didn’t get it at first. I had a strong affinity for Panic, of course, because of their association with Untitled Goose Game, Thank Goodness You’re Here, but most notably, from years before: Firewatch. With an even better track record of publishing games than Annapurna Interactive (rest in peace), Panic getting into producing not only hardware, but niche hardware at that felt like they were selling membership to an exclusive club that I, a fan of indie games, would never get to participate in, but as I kept thinking about it and seeing people post about it, the device seemed increasingly more charming.
The first time I put my hands on a Playdate was on an emulator. Browsing itch.io the year after the Playdate’s release in 2022 made me feel like I was missing something not only in the moment I was missing it, but that the feeling was permanent; that I would never get to know. Obviously playing any Playdate game on an emulator prevents you from engaging with the main feature of the handheld, the crank, which I will go into detail later.
If you’ve never heard of the Playdate before, it looks like this:
Notice the crank on the side, and I can say, as a now owner of the Playdate, it is not a gimmick. It is as essential as the display is to the Switch, or maybe the best feature of the Switch is its portability, but I digress. Without putting your hands on it, I will admit that it is borderline impossible to sell another person on both the mindblowing utilization of the crank, as well as the tangible satisfaction of ‘cranking it’ for lack of technically a better term, but a funny one nonetheless. Even writing this, I am faced with this small regret that the vast majority of people who play video games, but specifically, even the people who enjoy small indie games (small here not intended as a disparaging term, but as a classification for the type of indie game on the Playdate) will never get to experience the utter joy of both the Playdate itself and the games on it.
After I bought a Playdate, the people I showed it to were less than impressed by both the price (about $200) as well as the size and nature of games on it. If you buy the Playdate (which I definitely recommend), I would encourage you to engage with it on its own terms because that’s what it requires. The one thing holding Playdate back from its own success is the boring and incurious idea that a handheld console has to be powerful and capable of playing “games”: the type of games that “gamers” play. Bliss is on the other side of any individual’s opposition to the Playdate in any and every form. As unwilling as any Call of Duty player would be to admit that a game like Root Bear is fun, what they don’t know is that Root Bear will hit the same part of their synapses that go off as rounding the corner and popping off the shotgun at an enemy.
Video games are experiences that feel good, and while there is genre preference, the brilliance of the Playdate is that the experiences feel universal, like they’re tapping into a specific joy that is not mitigated by preference or limited by ability, or even understanding.
The first game in the series of games that comes with the Playdate is called ‘Casual Birder’, an experience where you play a boy taking pictures of birds to complete objectives and satisfy NPCs. It is a wonder to play. It asks so little of you and yet offers you so much in return. I struggle to find words to describe these games because the simplicity of the experience is the point and yet, there is so much to say. Walking around town looking for birds invokes play in its purest sense, accentuated by looking at a small screen, using the crank to locate and photograph the birds that you find. Even in my first experience, I realized why the crank was essential; the importance of the how your hands move affects the game more than holding your hand in a static position for hours at a time like any controller or keyboard would ask of you. The Playdate asks you to ‘play’ with both it and the game you’re playing.
If you have any affinity for indie games, keep an eye on the Playdate and play it if you ever get a chance. I guarantee you will not regret it.
-
I won’t play mobile shooters
This is the link to the article.
Remember Diablo Immortal? Well, this game is made by the same people, so there’s that.
I don’t play mobile games very much unless they are games that can be played with one hand and paid little attention to while still maintaining a high level of skill at the game. I don’t want to be bad at something I’m playing with one hand. It’s a shooter though. Why would I play a shooter on my phone?
If you haven’t suffered through the experience of Diablo Immortal (or if you have), let me give you a brief overview of my problem with it.
This is the UI. It mostly resembles my experience, but imagine that the bottom left and right sides of this image are covered by thumbs, then think of trying to hit the tiny buttons above the big purple missile. I’m going to ignore the difference between the two ticks of 373 which are presumably damage and the boss’s health which has been whittled down to 159,884 despite the fact that the red in the background of the health bar which is presumably supposed to represent the overall percentage is consistent all the way across.
-
Let’s stop pretending to be scared
Indie games are really only distributed in two ways now: Steam and itch, a relatively prominent indie game distribution platform that you may not have heard of. I say ‘relatively’ because while its commonly known in the world of indie games, it isn’t necessarily known outside of indie games as I’ve only ever heard a few mentions of it in the mainstream. I would compare its popularity to PICO-8, an incredibly fun and minimalist approach to gated indie distribution as well as game engine all within a compact packaged executable.
The pitch of itch (also commonly referred to as itch.io) is that anyone can upload anything provided that it isn’t blatantly illegal (copyright infringement, excessive gore, and illegal sex stuff).
Only 2 out of the 24 games put out today are not horror games.
Horror is an increasingly bloated genre on itch.io taking up increasingly more space as the platform grows in both popularity but also in the indie market and specifically a way for indie games to get exposure via offering free content in a packaged demo/mini experience on itch, then encouraging players to buy the complete game from Steam usually at a relatively low price between $5 and $20 depending on the scope and length of the game for the most part.
I have always believed that letting the indie game ‘market’ (for lack of a better term) sort itself out is the best option, but I’m starting to feel like people have figured out how to manipulate itch’s audience to get the most people to play their game. I’d have to go back and analyze the top sellers page, but horror games are filling more and more space on the top sellers page than ever. Other than itch’s curated list of featured games (aptly titled “Featured Games”), it is the one other place that itch users are led to if they don’t know where to go. It would make sense that an inexperienced user of itch would look to the most popular games on itch to see the type of games that represent the platform. But the issue is they don’t.
itch knows they aren’t the best that indies have to offer
This is not itch’s fault. They are simply hosting a page that displays to users the most popular games at that time and that makes sense to do so. itch is being let down by both its users and the developers who makes these games. It’s rare for the most popular games to coincide which the featured games. In another section itch curates, Fresh Games, the games are ranked by how often they are added to collections. Itch has never explicitly stated this, but I assume that it isn’t just a raw number of being added to collections because otherwise it would be easily manipulated. I imagine it has more to do with games that are added to collections that have a certain number of users or a specific type of user following them. Itch is by no means obligated to share exactly what process games go through to end up on the ‘Fresh Games’ list, but the games on the most popular list are almost never on the ‘featured’ games or ‘fresh’ games pages.
Why?
Itch knows that the YouTube bait jump scare horror games aren’t really worth playing.
-
I miss the school library
In seventh grade, my friends and I would all congregate around one or two computers in the school library and fawn over whatever games were coming out next. This could have been GameSpot, GameTrailers, or another website I don’t remember, but they served a really important purpose: a social gathering place for like-minded people to enthuse about video games.
Trailers don’t need to be written about. They’re on YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram and those are the appropriate places for trailers to be shared and seen, but now we are inundated on things that we can already find on our own.
I don’t think there is a central location to find video game trailers anymore and gaming news sucks now. It’s either a guide, a trailer, a quote from a developer, or a fun fact about a game.
Tomorrow some guy is going to beat Elden Ring with a recorder that he made out of a piece of celery and nearly every outlet is going to write about it except for PCGamesN because PCGamesN sucks.
One response to “I won’t play mobile shooters”
100% yes! Though many games have tried to make mobile equivalents they often come off as terrible ports to me. I have the most fun on my phone when playing NYT word games or Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Maybe one day they will come up with good controls for touchscreens for fps/moba etc but I haven’t seen it yet.