Lovers of portable games and cool gadgets will no doubt have seen the reviews of Playdate go live last week. Panic’s cute throwback console is a celebration of simpler playing times, and we were lucky enough to get our fingers in an early – we found that it was a nice little yellow system that sends us back “to a time when handheld video games were a simpler, more innocent pastime, and each new experience felt fresh and exciting “.
In addition to the new games it comes loaded with, Playdate is also an open platform with developers of all sizes who can create and distribute easy-to-load software for it. One such piece of software is Playnote Studioa nice little app for anyone who misses the Nintendo DSi’s brilliantly simple animation tool, Flipnote Studio.
While Nintendo’s animation app may not be available for download these days, the short flipbook-style masterpieces created using Flipnote Studio can be viewed on Playdate using developer James Daniel’s software. The app is based on a previous web-based player, and it uses the console’s crank to let you rewind back and forth through animation frames.
Nintendo’s Flipnote apps attracted a dedicated, passionate fan base and still evoke emotions to this day. An April Fool’s prank back in 2020, which ‘leaked’ a Switch version, led to copious amounts of faniri targeting the ghosts. That same year, a fan unveiled an incredible 34-minute animation painstakingly created in Flipnote Studio 3D, the 3DS version. Yep, that’s some dedication right there!
You can go to playnote.studio for more information on how to download the app for your Playdate and enjoy Flipnotes to your heart’s content.
“Download the app for our Playdate? What if you’re not in Distribution Group 1?” Ah, while we may have a single Playdate in the Nintendo Lite Towers, some of us on Team NL have some waiting time until our personal Playdates are shipped. In the meantime, we download the app and make it ready, ready and waiting to review some selected flipnotes.
