as you can see, things are going great
give me one good reason i shouldn’t “jump ahead” in the “season” to have more than 2 games on this thing?? also what the fuck with this bumper sticker they included. also holy fuck this thing is not comfortable to hold, i can feel my ergonomic hardware‐accustomed hands rebelling against this tall thin NES controller
the playdate catalogue feels like we’ve rewinded to the early iOS App Store. a calculator app costs $5, an alarm clock app costs $5, a planner app costs $4, and an MP3 player costs $9. why did i buy a game console in 2021 that does not have a backlit screen
anyway good news: there’s an official “Mirror” app that lets you see, hear, and virtually push buttons on the console from your PC, essentially allowing you to “dock” this thing.
bad news: this does not allow remote control of the crank, microphone, or motion sensor inputs, which are all of the actually interesting input methods. so i cannot mitigate much of my hand pain this way. you also can’t un/lock it through the PC app for some reason?
more bad news: this has a performance cost significant enough that some games do not recommend using it, or have a specific “low performance” mode for this purpose that cripples some function of the game. (such a disclaimer on a game’s page is how i discovered this Mirror app exists in the first place.)
feats i have already accomplished with this thing after only having had a few free hours to poke at it:
- hard‐crashed it simply by trying to unwrap a new software install;
- caused the UI in “Settings” → “Games” to lock up until i returned to the home menu, seemingly because the “Wi‐Fi Error” dialogue box popped up multiple times (after i had moved it out of range) but i could only interact with one of them;
- had ⁓9 download errors in a row for 1 of the 24 season 1 games despite the other 23 never having any errors. (thankfully it did somehow eventually download and install without problems after retrying enough times — which took ages, because downloads on this thing take ages.)
- by the way, if you select “Download All” while multiple pieces of software are queued, every pending software entry gets a percentage progress indicator for the current download or installation. yes, until they are all installed, they all indicate the progress for one of them, and you don’t know which one of them that is, or how many of them are done. so unless you’re watching and counting how many cycles it’s gone through, these indicators are functionally useless for multiple downloads.
anyway this is a lot of problems to immediately have with a device on its second major OS version with a relatively small problem space (as i had no sideloaded software or any otherwise unusual use cases engaged yet).
also there is absolutely no way in hell that the “14 day” battery life estimate for sleep mode is accurate considering that i can watch the battery meter tick down multiple pixels within an hour while it’s locked, and other users online seem to agree that Panic’s estimate here is very generous. maybe it could get on the order of a few days if you disabled Wi‐Fi? which you can’t actually do — the device has no airplane mode, so the closest you get is just forgetting every Wi‐Fi network i guess?
to be clear, i don’t necessarily regret this purchase, i am just hyper‐critical and learning a lot here. (i installed a Celeste Classic port recently, so if nothing else i have a tiny Celeste device, which is pretty good.) but later i will be writing up a post about the fundamental flaw that makes the crank extremely difficult to use as a control in most games.