151–160 of 215 posts
180 dollars (plus shipping) is more than it'd cost for a modified gameboy plus a flashcart, and is near the price of an Analogue. The Analogue can play any gameboy (and advance) game every made, and is also a musical instrument. If this was around 80$ I would be all over it.
I've gone through the page a bunch of times now, read through the hn comments here and the arstechnica article linked in the top comment. But I'm still having a hard time appreciating this as art or even something non-gimicky and even slightly scammy. For $179 + shipping you're buying a small underpowered device with a black and white screen, a handcrank analog controller and 24 games. For an extra $29 you can buy a…
They never positioned it as a competitor to a modern portable like the Nintendo Switch so who cares? Do any of those games on the home page look like they need a modern chip?
> They have no actual plans for any kind of centralized distribution for games.
What are you basing that off of? Because they didn't detail the specifics of how the games are going to be distributed?
> Just because a well known name is behind a project doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good product or a great idea.
Indeed, which is why you can wait to buy it until it's out and has been reviewed by others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a bit shocked at the price! It’s the same price I recently paid for a switch lite. I don’t understand how it can be so expensive.
Economies of scale. Nintendo has decades of hardware expertise, industry weight, and manufactures several orders of magnitude more units. I think the price is pretty fair for a neat, boutique thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a bit shocked at the price! It’s the same price I recently paid for a switch lite. I don’t understand how it can be so expensive.
Economies of scale. Nintendo has decades of hardware expertise, industry weight, and manufactures several orders of magnitude more units. I think the price is pretty fair for a neat, boutique thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have two personal use cases 1) Myself, I grew up on a game boy color and I have a nostalgia for playing games where the developers were so bound by compute resources on the device they were developing for. It allowed smaller teams to be very competitive in game design but also enabled a different sort of creativity than what is commonly seen today in game design where resources are virtually unlimited. I've also be…
ok I can see that. Its just if I came across this website and didn't know any better. I'd 100% think this is some elaborate April fools prank. look at the game titles. Forest Byrnes Up in smoke Casual Birder Executive Golf It just seems like they're trying to hard not to be "cool" and trying not to take themselves seriously.
I've gone through the page a bunch of times now, read through the hn comments here and the arstechnica article linked in the top comment. But I'm still having a hard time appreciating this as art or even something non-gimicky and even slightly scammy. For $179 + shipping you're buying a small underpowered device with a black and white screen, a handcrank analog controller and 24 games. For an extra $29 you can buy a…
How much should it be?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economies of scale. Nintendo has decades of hardware expertise, industry weight, and manufactures several orders of magnitude more units. I think the price is pretty fair for a neat, boutique thing.
Check what Aliexpress has to offer for 1/10th of the price... Even with games, it seems very expensive...
If looking at raw CPU speed is what makes a console fun for you, and creativity doesn't matter at all, this is clearly not your platform. Some of us have different metrics for what makes game platforms fun that aren't just it costs less than a 24 pack of pepsi, 8000 choices of softcore pornography mahjong games, and how many polygons you can throw on a screen while cooking an egg on the graphics card.
The Alibaba consoles are just straight up creativity death - their business model is to bottom feed what tiny value remains out of old games they didn't make. Their long term accomplishment, should society be awful enough to let them solely succeed, will be the death of any ability to make new games or innovate in any way, leaving the entire non-Nintendo industry to just bottom feed compete with each other on slightly cheaper consoles in an eventual race to the bottom, while Nintendo releases the 600th version of Mario Kart, because it's easier and safer for them to copy than to innovate.
Playdate has a real chance to inject some creativity, competition, and openness to the platform world, and there's nothing especially novel about that to anyone that has read the history of computing and knows what games like Spacewar did. These kinds of "novelties" have a way of changing everything in ways nobody can really understand at the time.
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> The device is nothing extraordinary (imo) This is it: the peak Hacker News comment. A gizmo with a handcrank and a black and white screen is nothing out of the ordinary in 2021. I bet you could even make it yourself in a weekend if you just use a Raspberry Pi and an e-ink screen!
How it works and what it does and what it's made of are very different things (cite: Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance) and once the novelty of how it works has worn off (yes, kudos, BTW) what is left is a mildly interesting device. The SDK and ecosystem are also mildly interesting, but the cute factor will wear off quickly and it's probably go the way of Neil Young's Pono.
I wonder how well this will fare after initial novelty wears off. And will it sell nearly enough units for there to be games for it in future... I do remember products like OUYA and how well they did...