Whitewater Wipeout
Whitewater Wipeout is the first game in Season One, so I thought it’d be the perfect game to test out my new Playdate. It’s from Kyoto-based Chuhai Labs, who made Cursed to Golf and – more relevantly to Whitewater Wipeout – Carve Snowboarding, a VR snowboarding game on the Meta Quest 2 that has a Playdate-exclusive prequel (Carve Jr.). Why all the surfing and snowboarding games? Well, Chuhai Labs used to be VITEI Inc., and both had a CEO named Giles Goddard, and one of his earliest hits back when he was a programmer? 1080 Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64. He also made the Super Mario 64 Mario head that you could stretch and deform in the intro, and was a programmer on Star Fox. You could say he knows what he’s doing.
I didn’t know any of this when I booted up Whitewater Wipeout for the first time. I saw the Chuhai Labs logo and vaguely remembered them making a snowboarding game, but my only venture into the VR world was the first-generation PSVR on the PlayStation 4, which I can’t play for any length of time without the cat attacking the cord, and which didn’t have a Carve port. But I digress.
… It took me ten tries to not immediately crash my surfboard.
This was my first Playdate game, and the first to show me the potential of the crank, and the first to show me the focused scope that a Playdate game might have, and the first to show me the wonder of discovering exactly how a Playdate game works. Being an all-digital system, there’s no instruction manual for these games. But now that I think about it, we haven’t had instruction manuals for small indie games since the days of the original Xbox LIVE Arcade games. You can teach us how to play your game in-game, or you can let us stumble into the answer ourselves, risking that we’ll just give up and walk away from your game forever. Whitewater Wipeout opted for the second option.
With a straightforward command of, “CRANK IT YO!” in an all-caps, gnarly 90’s font, you’re dropped into the wave from the top. Okay, I’ll only use the crank. I spin it and I wipe out. I immediately try again with no waiting, with a Super Meat Boy compulsiveness to do better this time. I wipe out again. What am I doing wrong? Ten tries before I get a single point on my scoreboard.
I try not spinning it. I finesse the crank instead. I slowly come to realize that the direction the crank is pointing is the way the front of your surfboard is pointing. Crank down, surf down, build up speed, crank up, leap out of the wave. Spin the crank while you’re in the air? Do a 360. Surf down, build up speed, surf back up into the air, crank twice really fast, DOUBLE 360. Surf down too far, get eaten by a shark. Take too long, the wave catches up to you. I got as far as a triple 360 spin one time, but there is no chance I’m ever topping the 2-million-plus points on the worldwide leaderboard. Oh yeah, this thing has an online leaderboard.
It’s a small, simple game that takes so much precision with an innovative control scheme and can be played for just a few minutes (or seconds) at a time. There’s no win state, just high score chasing. “Is this what all Playdate games will be like, small arcade experiences?” I wonder. And some of them: absolutely yes. But with the open architecture and the ability to sideload non-approved apps and games in a way that would make Apple blush, you’ll soon see that many Playdate games are absolutely not like this even a little bit. But a California Games-inspired high score chaser? Always good for a quick burst of serotonin and frustration in equal measure, and that’s a perfect fit for this quirky yellow thing that fits in your pocket.
(Included for free as part of Season One.)