Super Conductor
I didn’t know you could press B to make the train go faster for the first… ten levels or so. I thought Super Conductor was a calm, peaceful, toy-train-watching simulator. Which I was totally all about, even if it didn’t seem to have… I don’t know… a purpose more than that? What it actually is is a super-competitive “fastest to collect 100 coins with your train” score chaser, where I am, as of this writing, ranked fifth in the world (don’t check the scores right now – I’m going to ride this glory for as long as I can). The cool thing, though, is that if you just want to relax and watch your train go around the track, changing its direction every once in a while with the switches at the bottom of the screen, that’s a totally viable way to play. I almost wish I never discovered that train can go fast.
It's apparently based off the Commodore 64 game Donald Duck’s Playground, and the C64 seems like a prime place to get reasonable-scope Playdate game ideas. You control a little conductor man running back and forth across the bottom of the screen, flipping switches that each correspond to one track switch on the increasingly complex train track system on the top half of the screen. The train will keep going around and around with or without your input, but after collecting a handful of coins, you’ll be rewarded with a new, more complex track as the next level. The number of switches you’ll run between and coins you’ll collect on each level will vary a bit from one to the next, but the task is always the same: collect the coins.
The coins will appear in different places on the map, and your job is to untangle the wacky interconnected tracks to figure out which switch points the train to which track. It’s like one of those visual puzzles from Highlights magazine (“Fun with a purpose!”), where everyone gets long silly straws that are all bundled in a tangled mess and you have to figure out which drink they’re drinking from on the other side of the page. It’s great as a meditative experience, or you can go as fast as you can. It does a great job of making the next coin appear right before the train reaches the switch you should flip, making it a game you’ll really have to focus on if you want to get a top score. But there’s really nothing wrong with just letting the train toot along the track at a leisurely pace, like a train set going around the tree on Christmas morning.
I’ve always wanted a train set, and video games (especially ones on the Playdate!) are a much cheaper alternative to the real thing, which can easily run into the hundreds of dollars (and real trains don’t even have online leaderboards). It takes around ten minutes for a world-record run to collect all 100 coins, but you could easily spend a lot longer just hanging out with your little train set. Not a lot of games appeal to both sides of the spectrum, and it’s always nice to find one that does.
(Released August 13, 2024, on Catalog.)