Re:Panic Playdate In-Depth Review
by legitster on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @10:29AM
(#31167891)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
They built a handheld gaming system with a crank, put 24 games on it, and zero of them include fishing. Like really? Maybe I can sideload Legend of the River King.
I forget where I read this, but there was apparently an interesting phenomenon where each developer they went to immediately thought of making a fishing game, but felt that was so obvious that everybody else would already be making a fishing game.
And so, there are no fishing games :D
> One of the difficult things was figuring out if the final version of the crank was going to be a floppy crank or a stiff crank
> I had a little technique where I would grease it just enough for it to feel really good
Dude! Really? lol
The NES and Sega Master System have a ton of fun and engaging games. Both systems have controllers with only a d-pad and two buttons. The Playdate adds a crank and accelerometer.
NES controllers have 4 buttons. SMS controllers have 2 buttons each, but some games, like Alex Kidd & Wonder Boy required you to also use the pause button on the console itself.
I agree you don't need a slew of buttons for a good game, but a lot of that design space has been explored already. I've seen some clips of the games in action, and it doesn't look like anyone is really using the crank or accelerometer in fun enough ways (after all, accelerometers have been on AAA console controllers for a while now and are relatively underutilized). I know this is subjective though :)