Paddle vs Paddle
You know, there are plenty of Pong clones out there. When Pong was first invented, it seemed like every department store and its mother had a new “TV Game Machine” that would let you play some variation of it at home. The Playdate even has a few variations of it among the 1,600+ games tagged “Playdate” on Itch. But how many of them let you have two players play face-to-face on a single Playdate console, with multiple different input methods for controlling your little paddle? How many of them let you have one paddle be really big and the other be really small to make it fair when you’re playing, say, a tiny baby? How many of them have a mode where the ball will ricochet off the walls at a wacky angle randomly, challenging your gamer skills to the max? Maybe only Paddle vs Paddle.
You don’t have to play any of these weird modes, either — there’s an “Old School” setting that makes it feel just like you’re playing classic Pong, whether it’s you against another person or against the computer. There’s an easy or hard mode CPU opponent, too, and I’m not sure it’s actually possible to score on the hard computer opponent on classic mode? Well, that’s where Chaos mode comes in. Sometimes the ball will hit the wall and fly off at a funny angle like a football, and while yeah, that’s hard to hit, it’s REALLY tough for even the strong computer AI to counter. It’s your only chance! I know this because you can set two hard mode CPU opponents to play against each other and just watch it go like an old sports game. It’s basically a screensaver at this point, but it will still go to the lock screen if you don’t touch a button for long enough (maybe there’s a setting to disable that?).
Wow, really buried the lede here, though. The big reason to get this is to play local 1-on-1 with another person in real life. One of you uses the D-pad, and the other uses the A/B buttons or the crank (either 180-degree mode or the full 360-degree range — I prefer the 180 because it feels so right to have such tight control over the paddle that way). And the other modes let you make one paddle bigger than the other, or the previously mentioned wild ball bounces, and there’s a mode where the ball looks like a comet with a tail and sends out sparks whenever it hits something. At the end of the day, it IS just some variations of Pong, but there really aren’t that many games of any kind that let you play two players on the same tiny console. The real question, though: where do you make the second person sit?
The answer is, of course: Santa style.
(Released June 9, 2026, on Catalog and Itch. Copy provided by developer.)