Panic Playdate In-Depth Review

I&#x27;m normally into kitschy, retro handheld gaming devices like this. I was in a flurry to get the Analogue Pocket. I love the Gamebuino and Arduboy.<p>By all accounts, I should be smack dab in their target demographic.<p>Yet, for some reason I don&#x27;t fully understand, I have no interest in the Playdate.<p>The design of the main device is super slick. I want to want to play games on it. Even the idea of the crank has some appeal. I can imagine Stardew Valley style fishing, or some Zelda mini games fitting right in with it.<p>Then I look at it all together and my heart gives it a big old meh that I can&#x27;t explain.

At ~230€ (w&#x2F; tax&amp;shipping) it&#x27;s a very hard proposition, even for someone with an interest in weird devices and disposable income. A gamer that likes indie games, probably be more at home with the cheaper Switch Lite and a few games from the online store.<p>Still, I love that we live in a world where making such an open device with 24 included games is possible. Consumer hardware at scale is quite hard and capital-intensive, so kudos to Panic on shipping. I might end up getting one at some point…

According to the wikipedia page of the Playdate, it&#x27;s run by a STM32F746 microcontroller [1]. It is interesting that it has lower specs than the Mario Game and Watch STM32H7B0 cpu [2], which is itself quite limited by its RAM and flash.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Playdate_(console)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Playdate_(console)</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Upcycle-Electronics&#x2F;game-and-watch-hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Upcycle-Electronics&#x2F;game-and-watch-hardwa...</a>

The ergonomics of this device just seem to bite it. Yeah it looks nice, but it&#x27;s not easy to hold and crank and do other things. So many reviewers seem to touch on it being uncomfortable, this one included.

The lack of buttons killed my interest. The difference between the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance was night and day with just those two extra buttons. The crank is cute, but nothing speaks to these games having enough depth or choices to actually want to carry around this device.

Looking at how the device was marketed as being easy to develop for, I was assuming it would be the physical equivalent of something like the pico-8.<p>Pico-8 is known for it&#x27;s openness to hackability, and users have implemented features that aren&#x27;t originally provided by the API like sprite dithering and 3D rendering.<p>But looks like the device has really under-powered hardware to provide that, especially given the price.<p>If the playdate SDK doesn&#x27;t allow poking around into raw memory, it&#x27;s wasted potential in my opinion.

I&#x27;m banking on many, many Gameboy games being ported to the playdate. That&#x27;s sort of my dream when buying one.

If there&#x27;s one thing that I&#x27;ve learned from all of this, it&#x27;s that I never realized so many people wanted fishing games.

These look really neat, and simple (and innocent) enough for my young kids to use.<p>It’s a shame they’ll be snapped up by people three times their age and used for twenty minutes before becoming a shelf ornament.

Whoops, getting a broken certificate...<p>&gt; api.uat.loopring.pro

Just like how the Steam Deck was a hype product, the PlayDate is yet another hype product which basically will be used as brilliant paper weight after just 1 hour of playtime.