{"id":22794,"date":"2023-01-20T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2023-01-20T00:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=22794"},"modified":"2022-11-24T13:52:05","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T13:52:05","slug":"playdate-update-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/20\/playdate-update-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"PlayDate Update: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A couple of months ago I reviewed the PlayDate, a new handheld gaming device that has a crank on the side that you can wind to control some of the games.\u00a0 The other unique thing about this device is how you get the games.\u00a0 They come two at a time and are downloaded automatically on the handheld each week on a Monday.\u00a0 I talked about a few of them when I wrote my initial review<\/strong><\/a>, and then another batch of ten more about a month later<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 And now I\u2019ve got my final batch of ten from season one, so we\u2019ll go over those as well as my final thoughts on the PlayDate.<\/p>\n

StarSled<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really like this one.\u00a0 It reminds me of old Atari vector graphic games.\u00a0 You use the crank to steer a ship around space, and the ship leaves behind a trail.\u00a0 Your job is to encircle sparks with the trail.\u00a0 But you have to be careful and only trap ONE spark.\u00a0 Any more and you\u2019ll explode and must start the stage over.\u00a0 You also have to avoid colliding into enemy ships and other obstacles.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lot of fun and really fits the concept of the PlayDate games well.<\/p>\n

Saturday Edition<\/strong><\/p>\n

This reminds me of point and click adventure games from the mid to late 80s, and even some in the 90s.\u00a0 You play as John Kornfield, who was abducted by aliens and lived on their planet for a while, but was sent back to Earth when the political powers reshifted on that planet.\u00a0 When you play as him, you are first trying to get into a locked gate, and once you solve that puzzle, you are whisked away to your apartment where you escape the police by using a fire exit and then you can drive to other parts of the city.\u00a0 Two reasons why it was hard for me to stay interested in this.\u00a0 One, the text is so small to read on that tiny screen.\u00a0 And two, the story was just all over the place.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll come back to it when I\u2019m more in the mood and don\u2019t have as many other games to play.<\/p>\n

Inventory Hero<\/strong><\/p>\n

This one\u2019s kind of an RPG, but plays like a cleverly disguised card game.\u00a0 You\u2019re always in turn-based battles, but you don\u2019t have control over them.\u00a0 This part reminds me of a PSP game I really enjoyed a long time ago called Half-Minute Hero.\u00a0 As you fight battles, you\u2019ll gain items in the form of cards, and you can have five in your deck at all times.\u00a0 You must choose to either equip a card with the A button, or discard it with the B button.\u00a0 There are cards with armor on them you can equip, as well as healing items.\u00a0 You\u2019ll want to discard trash cards as well as equippable items that make you weaker.\u00a0 But the items you have equipped constantly break, so you pretty much equip whatever you can.\u00a0 Watch out for cards that can \u2018poison\u2019 your deck and fill them up with trash cards!\u00a0 The game ends when you run out of HP, and the game saves your high score in the form of how high a XP level you got.\u00a0 I kind of wish this one was a mobile game instead, as it really fits that style of gameplay. \u00a0Just a fun little timewaster.<\/p>\n

Spellcooked<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cooking game except you are mixing potions instead of food.\u00a0 Each day you get orders and ingredients in your email, and you must use them to fill the orders.\u00a0 To make potions, you use the crank to stir them in the pot, or crush them into powder with a mortar and pestle. \u00a0Since all the things you cook are imaginary and not real food, it\u2019s kind of hard to know if you\u2019re doing it right.\u00a0 But I guess it makes things more imaginative.\u00a0 I think it would be cool if there were an actual Cooking Mama game on the PlayDate.<\/p>\n

Snak<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know those games where you\u2019re a snake and you have to eat dots and when you do you grow longer, and you have to keep from biting your tail?\u00a0 Yeah this is one of those kinds of games.\u00a0 This snake game is mostly known for being one of the first games on cell phones, but it\u2019s actually been around way longer than that.\u00a0 They added a couple of things to this version, though.\u00a0 The things you eat can attach to your body, and if they reach your head it\u2019s Game Over.\u00a0 You can also push a button that makes your head bigger, I suppose this is the snake actually opening its mouth.\u00a0 You have to do this to eat the things otherwise they\u2019ll attach to your body anyway.\u00a0 If there are any new additions to this game, I don\u2019t know what they are. \u00a0Usually these simple kinds of games don\u2019t need instructions, but when they add stuff to an already existing formula, I think they kind of do.<\/p>\n

Sasquatchers<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of my guilty pleasures is I like watching ghost shows where an investigating team tries to find physical proof of ghosts.\u00a0 Yeah I know those shows are dumb, but I don\u2019t care.\u00a0 They\u2019re fun.\u00a0 I don\u2019t really get into the shows that do the same thing with Bigfoot, though.\u00a0 But this game is all about that.\u00a0 You control a bigfoot investigating team around a grid, and you must take pictures of them.\u00a0 It\u2019s like a non-violent Advance Wars.\u00a0 In fact, they even reference that game in the tutorial.\u00a0 Yes this game has a tutorial, thank goodness.\u00a0 In each level, your team gets a turn and the bigfoot gets a turn.\u00a0 You can move around, move the van around so you can resupply, find campsites so you can resupply without the van, etc.\u00a0 Each member of the team has different skills.\u00a0 There\u2019s a host, which you get bonus points if you take a picture of him.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a photographer who can take pictures of things, and a wrangler who can lure bigfoot, calm it down, etc.\u00a0 Your goal in each level is to take pictures so you can earn money and get lots of \u2018likes.\u2019\u00a0 I\u2019m torn on this one because I like the premise, but I\u2019m not big into strategy games like this.\u00a0 I think I\u2019d be more willing to play this game on a regular console with a bigger screen.<\/p>\n

Battleship Godios<\/strong><\/p>\n

This one\u2019s a 2-D side scrolling shooter.\u00a0 It looks typical at first, but one unique thing is that you only get one bullet that bounces around the screen, and in order to shoot it again you must catch it with your ship.\u00a0 Which is hard to do since the screen is so tiny. \u00a0If you get hit, you can use the crank to rewind time, but you can still only do this three times and then your lives run out.\u00a0 Not too terribly fun.<\/p>\n

Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another typical 2-D game, this time a side scrolling platformer.\u00a0 You play as a park ranger armed with a shovel (hmm that sounds familiar) that you can use to swipe at obstacles and dig holes in the ground.\u00a0 You are constantly being chased by a forest fire but the dumb thing is that it chases you during the tutorial level so you don\u2019t have time to read the signs telling you how to play.\u00a0 You can turn the crank to do gimmicky things like pull up a bucket in a well.\u00a0 Play control wasn\u2019t very good because you\u2019re supposed to be able to double jump but it only worked about 10 percent of the time.\u00a0 It\u2019s a shame because this could\u2019ve been a decent game had it played well.<\/p>\n

b360<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you ever played the old arcade game Gyruss?\u00a0 It\u2019s really fun, and the best way to describe it is that it\u2019s a cross between Galaga and Tempest.\u00a0 Interesting fact: the creator of Gyruss would later move to Capcom from Konami and helped make a little known game you might\u2019ve heard of called Street Fighter.\u00a0 Anyway, the best way to describe b360 is that it\u2019s a cross between Gyruss and Arkanoid.\u00a0 You use the crank to move a paddle in a circle, and bounce a ball to hit blocks in the middle of the screen.\u00a0 There are four walls that the ball can hit and they\u2019ll disappear when you do that once, and when the ball goes outside the walls, you lose a life.\u00a0 The hard part about this game is that since you\u2019re moving in a circle, it can be hard to judge the trajectory of the ball.\u00a0 Plus it doesn\u2019t help that I\u2019m not very good at Breakout style games anyway.\u00a0 I like them, I\u2019m just not good at them!<\/p>\n

Ratcheteer<\/strong><\/p>\n

This one\u2019s a top down overhead adventure game, very similar to Zelda.\u00a0 It really reminds me of Link\u2019s Awakening, my favorite Zelda game, so that\u2019s a plus.\u00a0 It has a more modern setting, too.\u00a0 They don\u2019t give you a lot to go on, but I think you are in an underground fallout shelter and everyone is in frozen sleep.\u00a0 But every so often, you get woken up to maintain the machines, so that\u2019s what you are doing.\u00a0 You find a lantern to light dark passages, but to charge it up you must use the crank.\u00a0 Then you find your \u2018sword\u2019 which is actually a wrench.\u00a0 You can use it to slash at enemies, or use the crank to swing it around which also turns certain machines.\u00a0 There\u2019s even dungeons to explore, like a power plant.\u00a0 Once neat thing is they tried to make the text as big as they could most of the time, so I appreciated that.\u00a0 If only the screen were backlit or bigger, I\u2019d be more inclined to play it longer.<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts on the PlayDate<\/strong><\/p>\n

And those are all the games in Season One for the PlayDate!\u00a0 Overall, I do like the creativeness and playfulness of the handheld with the crank and all.\u00a0 And it\u2019s cool how you get the games in that you don\u2019t have to buy any of them!\u00a0 But I do have some problems with it.\u00a0 Like the small screen that isn\u2019t backlit makes it hard to see some of the games.\u00a0\u00a0 And only about half the games on here were interesting to me.\u00a0 I pre-ordered the PlayDate during the beginning of the COVID scare when we were all stuck at home and I was sad about that.\u00a0 But I think if I had to buy it now, I\u2019d pass on it simply because money is tighter now.\u00a0 And that\u2019s really all I have to say about the PlayDate.\u00a0 If they ever do a Season Two, you know I\u2019ll write about the games here!\u00a0 Later!\u00a0 –Cary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago I reviewed the PlayDate, a new handheld gaming device that has a crank on the side that you can wind to control some of the games.\u00a0 The other unique thing about this device is how you get the games.\u00a0 They come two at a time and are downloaded automatically on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22794","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\/22794","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=22794"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22858,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22794\/revisions\/22858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}