LogFAQs > #975582132

Game #3 Complete! Boogie Loops

Final Thoughts: I like how this started as a friendly suggestion to get me to clear something out earlier but ended delaying me like a week because I kept delaying playing it.

I'm finally calling it. I played around and made like six loops over the span of two hours and I'll be happy if I never hear about Boogie Loops again. This just isn't a good idea. It isn't a game at all, and as a music creation tool its awful. Like I mentioned before, this is slightly more complex than the little music creation tool from Mario Paint from 1993 that was like the fourth most interesting part of that game.

It is a really lazy little music design app and I feel like the developer was trying to retroactively justify their laziness. Honestly, I don't know how much is the fault of the developer and how much is the fault of the Playdate at this point. I haven't played enough games yet to have a good sense of its capabilities and just how much you can put into a single game (or "game") before the whole thing starts to break. I will mentioned that I did experience what I thought was my Playdate d-pad breaking at one point, but it just turned out the game was lagging incredibly badly. I quit out, went to the menu screen, and was able to move around fine. Then I went back into the game and had the same lag. I deleted the loop I was working on (I didn't really care that much about it honestly) and the new loop worked fine. So I dunno. I tried to google if this was a common occurrence but I'm going to take a wild guess and say I'm in the top ten of people in the entire world for playtime for this thing, so I didn't see if this was something a lot of people were experiencing or not. But it at least happened to me in the two hours I played this, so in my sample size of one it is a pretty serious issue.

You really don't have many tools to work with here and the way the developer hand waves it away is pretty funny. There's like eight different dance moves and the developer is like "haha we wanted to show how you just need to learn a few simple moves to put together a dance" and not "animating these dance moves was more effort than it was worth so I just did as much as I could in a weekend and called it a day". You have four different percussion options and two rhythm and some little tuning you can do, and that's it. It is just such a minimal little tool that I honestly don't know who would find this interesting.

And the sound system for the Playdate isn't that great! And while there does appear to be some way to get the loops off the system, it was more trouble than its worth and that sort of functionality isn't automatically built into the concept. So it is a bad idea on the wrong console that doesn't do the thing it wants to let you do and they didn't put enough tools in to make it worthwhile. Other than that, I have no complaints.

Also, this is so bad it makes me feel less good about the rest of the season, and the Playdate catalogue in general. I'm now worried how much stuff on here isn't going to be games, but worthless apps and vanity projects that people tried to shoehorn in because they didn't know how to make a game. Boogie Loops is so bad it makes me less excited about the Playdate. Its going to take some real work to top this one at the back end of the rankings

Should You Play It? Absolutely not. I spent no money on it and I'm still trying to figure out if I can get a refund.

Final Score: Real bad. Maybe a 2/10 if I'm being generous. This is a borderline 1/10 thing but it mostly works so it passes the "is it functional?" test. Real low 2/high 1 kinda quality here.

Games Completed: 3/90

Game Rankings:
3) Boogie Loops
2) Whitewater Wipeout
1) Casual Birder