Sprite
(He/Him/His)
So this beautiful boy has been in development for quite a while, and it sounds like they're making some major announcements this Tuesday, June 8th, at 9:00 PDT. The info they have given so far is that the system - along with the first season of 24 games - will cost $179, and the onboard storage is 4 GB.
For those who don't know, Playdate is basically the Portland hipster of dedicated handhelds. It's a quirky black and white system that's not meant to compete with the big boys and it will have a small, curated library. It's being made by Panic, the publisher of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. The idea behind it is that once a week you get a game as a surprise, with the intention being that you don't know what the games are until you get them. Their messaging is a little muddled on that front (they've shown bits of a few games now), but regardless, the whole thing seems right up the alley of the folks here obsessed with dedicated handhelds. The 24 games are from a variety of legitimate developers, and will run the gamut from short to long, experimental to traditional.
"Looks great," you may say, "but I'm sure scalpers will just scoop them all up and jack up the price." Well, good news!
They've switched from having limited stock to doing open pre-orders, which means as long as you order it during the pre-order period, you're guaranteed to get one. I am so, so, so relieved. The downside to this model is that it takes a lot longer to ship everything out, since they won't know what the total stock is until after the pre-order, but I am totally cool with waiting ages to get this thing just as long as I know I'm getting it.
$179 is... spicy, though not absurdly so, imo. They wanted to make it cheaper but COVID doubled the prices of their most critical components. Hopefully folks here who want it can afford it and will have enough time to save up for it. I'm just excited because it's a weird and obscure handheld which is designed to be weird and obscure, and that getting all the games for it will actually be possible.
EDIT: Be mindful that games in Season One are meant to be a secret, so discussion of them is spoiler territory. I think anything not part of Season One is fair game, though. Yes, this is weird.
Oh right, and there's a crank.
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