{"id":22593,"date":"2022-09-16T00:01:38","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T00:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=22593"},"modified":"2022-08-31T21:17:26","modified_gmt":"2022-08-31T21:17:26","slug":"lets-have-a-play-date-with-the-playdate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/16\/lets-have-a-play-date-with-the-playdate\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Have a Play Date With the PlayDate!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Way back in 2019 when I went to PAX West in Seattle, I saw a new handheld console called the PlayDate<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 It was simple, yellow, and had a black and white screen.\u00a0 And a crank you turned on the side!\u00a0 And it was just as charming as heck and I wanted one for some reason!\u00a0 Well I finally got one, so let\u2019s take a look at it!<\/p>\n

So this little yellow handheld goes the simplistic route and has just a D pad and two buttons.\u00a0 But on the side it also has a crank that you can turn to play the games!\u00a0 The screen is black and white, but it has a pretty high resolution so the graphics in the games can still be good aside from the monochrome.\u00a0 Only problems I have with the screen is that it\u2019s not backlit, so you have to be in good lighting to play it.\u00a0 And since the screen is so small it can be hard to see things sometimes.\u00a0 One thing I am impressed with is the sound.\u00a0 I figured it would just be Game Boy quality bleeps and bloops, but it\u2019s actually on par with the Game Boy Advance as far as sound quality goes.<\/p>\n

If I were offered to buy the handheld now, I probably would\u2019ve declined.\u00a0 Times are tougher right now and I need to work on saving money.\u00a0 But the pre-orders for the PlayDate happened around the time that COVID first started to hit back in 2020, so I was in \u2018depressed and stuck at home\u2019 mode and pre-ordered this thing with a \u2018you only live once\u2019 mindset.<\/p>\n

So before we talk about games, let\u2019s take a look at pictures of this thing.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the front of the box.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the back.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you open the box, here\u2019s what you see.\u00a0 I love the playful nature of this whole package, as the \u201cHave Fun\u201d word balloon is actually a box that houses the charging cord and instructions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the console in my hand, so you can see how small it is.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So how do you get games for this thing?\u00a0 Well the beauty is that you don\u2019t have to buy anything else past the console.\u00a0 Just hook it up to WiFi and you get two games every week on a Monday.\u00a0 Season One will have 24 games in total.\u00a0 Not sure if they\u2019ll have a Season Two or not.\u00a0 Supposedly you can make your own games as well, but I\u2019m not doing that!\u00a0 As of this writing, I\u2019ve had the PlayDate for two weeks and have four games on it, so I thought I\u2019d go over those briefly now.<\/p>\n

Whitewater Wipeout<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a surfing game and reminds me of that portion of T&C Surf Designs on the NES.\u00a0 So yeah not a good start right there.\u00a0 You use the crank to move your surfer dude around and try to do flips and tricks on the top of the wave and not wipe out.\u00a0 But just like the surfing portion of NES T&C Surf Designs, I couldn\u2019t figure this one out very well and could only get a high score of 30 points.\u00a0 But the graphics are good at least.<\/p>\n

Casual Birder<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this top down viewed RPG styled game, you have just moved to a new town where different species of birds live.\u00a0 You want to photograph all the birds, and can do so by pressing a button to bring up camera mode, and use the crank to bring the birds in focus.\u00a0 You have an album of 25 bird species to collect.\u00a0 Sometimes you must take a picture of certain birds to move the story along.\u00a0 And you also have to watch out for an evil gang of birdwatchers (ooo, I\u2019m shakin\u2019 in my boots!), who like to cheat and steal photos to win the bird photo competitions!\u00a0 I really liked the idea of this game, but it\u2019s hard to see the birds sometimes because they are so small on the screen.\u00a0 I wish this game would be ported to other consoles so I could play it there.\u00a0 Aside from the crank focusing feature, this one could totally be on consoles.<\/p>\n

Cranklin\u2019s Time Travel Adventure<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was the game that sold me on the PlayDate initially.\u00a0 Mainly because it was made by the same guy who did Katamari Damacy.\u00a0 I\u2019m a huge fan of that game and I\u2019ve played every other game that he was responsible for, including Noby Noby Boy and Wattam<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 In this game you play as Cranklin, a dude that looks like some kind of caterpillar.\u00a0 He has to make it to his date on time, and you turn the crank to make him move forward.\u00a0 Turn it the other way to make him go backwards.\u00a0 Along the route he\u2019ll react to certain things on screen.\u00a0 For instance, he\u2019ll duck to sniff a flower or jump over hurdles.\u00a0 There are bugs that are independent of your time travel movements, and if they hit you, you must start the stage over again.\u00a0 So you must time your crank movements so that he ducks by a flower or jumps over a hurdle at the same time a bug flies by so you avoid them.\u00a0 Once you reach your girlfriend, you move to the next level.\u00a0 I love some of the things she does to him at the end of the stage, like giving him a German suplex for being late!\u00a0 Dude, Cranklin, just wake up five minutes before three, she\u2019s not that far from your house!\u00a0 Only problem I have with this game is that I\u2019m not sure how you can start over if you wanted to.<\/p>\n

Boogie Loops<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last game on this list is less of a game and more of a music program you can mess around with. It\u2019s fine and all, I just wish you had instructions so you know what was going on.\u00a0 I guess you could probably look online, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a handheld gaming system, I think.<\/p>\n

So those are all the games I\u2019ve got so far.\u00a0 Two good ones and two not so good ones.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do about the other games.\u00a0 After I get ten more of them, I\u2019ll write another blog in about a month or so about those.\u00a0 And then a month after that, I\u2019ll do the same with the remaining ten.\u00a0 So should you get the PlayDate?\u00a0 Well it\u2019s too early for me to tell you that right now.\u00a0 I\u2019ll let you know in a couple of months when I play all the games for it!\u00a0 Later!\u00a0 –Cary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back in 2019 when I went to PAX West in Seattle, I saw a new handheld console called the PlayDate.\u00a0 It was simple, yellow, and had a black and white screen.\u00a0 And a crank you turned on the side!\u00a0 And it was just as charming as heck and I wanted one for some reason!\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22595,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22593\/revisions\/22595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}