I dream with a new mainstream handheld console that is neither an extension of a regular console experience, a smartphone, or a wine-powered Linux machine
I dream with a new mainstream handheld console that is neither an extension of a regular console experience, a smartphone, or a wine-powered Linux machine
When I was a kid in Brazil, we had a manga and anime club in my town. It was somewhat official. At our gatherings, there were lots of manga and VHS tapes that we exchanged and duplicated when possible. There were always two or three kids, each with a Nintendo DS. Sometimes more. For us, they were the rich kids. Back in 2005, it was unimaginable for most kids to own a DS, or even a Game Boy for that matter. They connected their devices and played some kind of Pokémon. I pretended I did not care and did not pay them overt attention. My envy knew no bounds.
At least a decate later, when the PSP was already going out of fashion (and was therefore much cheaper), I managed to get a PSP Go. It came fullly cracked with hundreds of games. I loved that cheap little thing. I eventually graduated to a PS Vita, which I believe was the finest piece of hardware I ever had in my hands. But the proprietary memory card was pricey, and so were the games. I didn't have lots to play. It's a bittersweet memory.
Seeing how the Vita became an emulation powerhouse makes me regret selling it.
I never owned a Nintendo DS, but a friend of mine lent me his for several years. I loved that too, but the stylus felt like a gimmick, and I would have gladly swapped it for regular controls. I was not a fan of the dual screens either. But at least it was interesting, you know? They were trying to do something different, and I respected them for that.
Now I have two retro handhelds, the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H (Anbernic). Cheap Chinese products, but decent enough. Setting them up correctly was not hard, but it was laborious.
Maybe I am crazy, but I still think handheld consoles could work in the mainstream. It won't happen, of course. But it would be awesome to be excited by hardware once again. Something unique that is not a phone or a way to play Windows games on the go. With games that are developed explicitly for handhelds, with UIs that are adequate for small screens and crazy features that wouldn't make sense in the living room. A sturdy piece of tech that is always there for you, suggesting nothing but escapism.
One can only dream.
It's interesting that you pined for Nintendo DS (undoubtedly the greatest video game handheld of all time, by the way) and then later dismiss the two things that made it so great that it beat all competition: the dual screens and stylus/touch screen.
I'd love a return to the DS glory days, where there was so much invention and experimentation. There are so many untapped ideas still to explore. Indie games are in the same vein, but I feel that without the constraints of the dedicated, underpowered handheld they don't quite scratch the itch.
Playdate was the last attempt at a totally new handheld with limited constraints. I made a game called YOYOZO for it that was named one of the "Best Games of 2023", alongside Mario and Zelda. But the device and user base are minuscule compared any other platform—certainly not mainstream—so it depends on your point of view whether you consider it a success or not. But it fits your dream.
I have to disagree slightly with your claim about the DS. I think that the greatest handheld of all time depends on the metric that you choose to evaluate it with. If you’re talking hardware, then the DS is a great console but the 3DS took everything that it did and improved it. On the other hand, you have a console like the PS vita which was an incredible piece of hardware that failed due to the support that it didn’t receive. That’s just from a hardware perspective though. If you wanna talk about these consoles currently, the psp and vita are still incredible to own due to their emulation abilities. They are arguably better consoles now than when they were being actively supported!
You could count the 3DS for sure because it can play DS games (albeit with stretched and blurry or small and sharp screen size). As much as enjoyed the 3DS—I still use my N3DS regularly—it's just an evolution not the revolution the original DS was. Plus the DS and my favourite the DS lite can play GBA cartridges. Some DS games even unlock secret bonuses if they detect a specific GBA cart in the slot. That's just the type of cool inventive stuff that we've not seen since. And that's my metric for judging best handheld: exclusive games. DS trumps all handhelds in terms of the breadth and depth of its exclusive game library, imho.
Thank you for YOYOZO! I enjoyed it.
It's a really well made game! I made a playdate game and quickly realized how well made Yoyozo is.
Appreciate you saying that, thank you. It takes a programmer to see past the veneer of visuals into the details and depth of what is really going on in a game. There is so much more happening than there appears to be on the surface. It takes very careful scoping and a huge amount of effort and focus to execute an idea to the level I did with YOYOZO. But it was worth it. That game changed my life, in both very bad and very good ways. Good luck with your game development efforts.
Thanks for playing. Have fun
;)
Retro consoles have legitimately reignited my passion for gaming. I was mostly out of the hobby until I got a hankering for some old PS2 games, and ended up getting a Retroid Pocket 5. I've now beaten games I had left by the wayside (Star Ocean 1), heard about but never got (Sonic and the Black Knight) or just want to revisit (FFT). I'm in my late thirties and have a daughter, and I can't overstate how big of a deal save states and speeding up the emulator is for me. I frankly can't play without them anymore, unless the game is extremely generous with saving (which a lot of RPGs are still bad at).
PS2 and the Wii are kinda the upper limit (can't speak for the Wii U, and PS3 emulation is still developing), but like, what else do I need? GBA, SNES, Wii, GameCube, PSX, PS2, PSP, etc. I could spend my entire lifetime playing just within these libraries and never buy a modern game again. And as Windows emulation gets better, it opens more and more access to my Steam library.
I absolutely love handhelds and am happy that I have one again.
Save states really are the game changer. Being someone in their 30s with kids, being able to stop and start at the drop of a hat makes games so much more approachable.
I've been inching my way through Custom Robo using Dolphin on my phone for the past year, and being able to save state at the start of a match so I don't need to go through the animations of losing and reloading makes playing even more approachable when I'm strapped for time.
Absolutely. It's even made go play my Switch less. There's a bunch of Switch games that I had bought where I just got the PSP or PS2 versions instead, just so I could save state. Like, if I'm in the middle of a dungeon and there's no save point, but my daughter want to build some Lego with me. Or if it's a three phase boss fight, and I have no interest in restarting from phase 1.
There's a boss in the Black Knight where you have to get the timing just right or you get thrown off and have to chaise the boss again. Absolutely not, I am save stating, and if I mess it up, I'll load and try again.
It's too huge of a QOL increase at my current life stage to ever give up on.
I played through The Italian Job and Yo-yo’s Puzzle Park (both PS1) using emulator save states. Both brilliant experiences that I simply wouldn’t have made time for without the benefit and accessibility of save states.
I have a lot of games I'd like to play on older consoles that I never got the chance to play. Save states really do make them so much more approachable. Once I find out about long reload cut scenes or things like that it's so easy to skip them and save minutes of time that can add up to hours over the course of a longer game
I think what is missing to make this mainstream is standardization for developers. The reason you can play so many PC games on the go is that Windows hardware and software is ubiquitous and such a powerhouse, even Linux games work by emulation. And developing for Windows and Linux is worth the time and money.
So if someone took the time to provide a platform that is compatible or even native to hardware for a majority of these smaller handheld consoles, you may have more indie games made for them. There is just such a huge variety of hardware out there…
I personally have a modified Game Boy Advance (added backlighting and lithium ion batteries) and love it, but there are no new games, I just play the classics. If anyone is interested though, homebrew games exist and the Wikipedia article about it provides a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_(video_games)?wprov=sfti1#Nintendo_DS
There are cartridges that provide emulation for the Game Boy, so I bet if someone developed the platform to program once and have it run on multiple systems without having to use any hacks and tricks with proprietary software, you would start seeing a marketplace of new games for older small handheld consoles.
The handheld experience you speak of has died with the Vita in my opinion.
The closest thing we have to such an experience is the Playdate but it’s not a mainstream device, I think it’s a neat thing but I’m not really willing to pay its price tag+taxes+shipping+whatever if they don’t sell directly in my region.
I know someone who has one who thought it was absolutely worth it though.
Yep
https://play.date/
This kinda fits the bill for you. Built from the ground up to be a standalone handheld console and is a pretty inspiring project.
The minimalism is expressed both internally and externally which is fairly refreshing for me. I had some fun developing a little game for it. It gave me a taste of what I imagined early game devs got to experience before modern software complexity caught on.
The handheld-feel is also pretty solid along with the form factor. The main issue probably is the price but I justify it based on the overhead cost of the internals and their philosophy.
I would say as a 36 year old it is the closest I was able to get to re-experiencing that feeling a lot of us are looking for. That feeling of sitting in the back seat of the car and flicking the top slide switch on the Game Boy to make the car ride feel just a tiny bit shorter.
The handheld experience has largely been replaced by cellphones. They even sell handheld docks to provide better controls.
Otherwise, yea you're looking at indie scenes with things like Playdate or like Raspberry Pico-powered custom handhelds.
Anbernic does have decent Portmaster support if you’re willing to get some custom firmware on it, and that’s pretty close to a bespoke console experience if you have any compatible games or find anything good in Ready to Run. Pico-8 is supported as an emulation core or through the arm64 core if you import it in, and there are plenty of games that could work through that.
I imagine Nintendo-Switch style controls which attach to the edges of an iPhone or Android phone, since phones have the hardware but touchscreens aren’t ergonomic for playing games.
A potential problem is that the mobile market is split between iOS and Android, and I don’t know if cross-platform support is efficient or even reliable. Also, the mobile software market is dominated by “mobile” games (ex: gacha); people who want to play “traditional” style games already have a console or PC.
However, Godot is starting to get popular and supports cross-platform export to both iOS and Android as well as console and PC. Also, this gadget may be simple enough that a smaller studio could create it, then a few mobile games could support it, and it would create a niche but self-sustaining market (especially since Playdate seems to be doing it with their own hardware and software. This hardware someone could 3D print in their garage and launch a Kickstarter for, and extending cross-platform games to support it is less work than giving them mobile support was in the first place).
I'm going to ask a stupid question, and for context I just spent the last couple of days installing emulators on my OnePlus 13 and bought a Backbone controller for it:
what's the Steam Deck not doing that you wish it would? Seems to fill that need--it's Windows games but it's still right there--although full disclosure I don't have one.
is it that mobile games on phones aren't covering that spread technologically or that you don't like what's available? I'm not advocating for it at all (hence emulators) and too many are F2P grind fests but a lot of popular franchises have mobile versions for full-price offline versions of their games, and some are mobile only.
I have my own answers for this but curious about your take.
The games you play on the Steam Deck are either ported to or designed for larger screens. The features, gameplay, UI, and other graphic elements were not designed to fully take advantage of the handheld format.
Mobile gaming generally sucks. Emulators are great, but I want a mainstream handheld that is not a retro gimmick (sorry, Playdate[1]). I long for a full-blown portable gaming experience built for entirely new games that feel current and relevant to a larger audience. I don't want a compatibility layer. I want games that are either ported to handhelds or developed from the ground up to run exclusively on a handheld. Even on my retro handhelds, I tend to favor GBA and PSP games because they were developed for small screens.
[1] I just found a Playdate to purchase in Brazil for R$ 3000. That's about twice our minimum wage for a black-and-white 2.7 inches screen. Which is ridiculous for our reality. You can buy an Xbox Series S with that money. With money to spare!
While new is always nice and I also tend to be more of a portable gamer myself (though as my kids age, I think I'm beginning to get away from it a little more!), we don't have anything new and nothing in the pipe.
So, why not explore libraries or games you haven't before? Have you tried the Game Gear library? How about Atari Lynx? Both portable systems. Otherwise, there's no way you've tried even every 7/10 on Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance and PSP.
There's so much left to mine in those libraries, I imagine you could play only the above and still never play absolutely everything in your lifetime.
My favorite handheld is my DSLite. In addition to DS games, it can also play GBA games natively. Plus, with the use of an R4 card (or the like), it can emulate NES, Gameboy, GBC, NES, SNES, Genesis/MD, Gamegear, ScummVM, Atari, and even old B/W Mac OS (if you happen to fancy some old school Scarab of Ra). The screen is definitely starting to show its age, but most of the games look fantastic on lower resolutions anyway. I have tried to replace it with other modern emulation options, but always come back to it for the sheer versatility.
Yup, you've got it!
With any handheld you have access to so much, it should assuage the won't for something brand new.
The DS is a great system too, with a ton of weird games. Though I admit, I haven't used either of mine in quite awhile, although I was recently using my N3DS to emulate some Virtual Boy, which is damn cool. Other than that, I'm kind of a sucker for Shaders on the more modern handhelds, so I have trouble going back to other hardware that can't manage them.
You should build one. It's fun.
I lack the ability and parts. Buying that kind of thing in Brazilk I could easily spend more than just buying a PS Vita for emulation.
Oh I didn't meat to compete with fast, modern, mass-produced devices. Build something like PlayDate!
As for the parts, just work with Chinese vendors. JLCPCB and Aliexpress has got you covered.
Games are meant to be made, not played! Portable consoles too! :-)
My first handheld was PSP Slim which I bought new at the time for around 200€. I even bought like 15 games before CFW and even a few games after that, but that was near the EOL for PSP.
I got heavily used GB Advance SP for 20€ after that to play those sweet Pokemon games for my very firat time on real hardware. I modded it to run from two 18650 batteriea that gave the Gameboy just enough juice to finish a game on one charge (Minish Cap) or base game in one and later game in two (Pokemon Ruby) - it lasted around 40 hours.
Then I managed the unbelievable - I got PS Vita phat for 80€ from my friend including 2x 8GB card and a few physical games. I got it at the EOL and managed to buy just a few physical games, bunch of digital ones and I played the crap out of it.
Then Switch Lite came out and I bought it new for around 250€. Then I spent god-knows-how-much on physical games for it. Ok, I will try a wild guess of... more than 500€ for.games. And then I bought a bunch of digital ones.
In the meantime, I modded the Vita and played and finished GTA Vice City and San Andreas on it. I have to say this is the best way to enjoy these games! I didn't finish the GTA 3, but got close.
Handheld gaming is the best thing in my gamer life that happened to me. You won't be surprised to hear that I preordersd and bought Steam Deck. And I played the heck out ofnit in those three and a half years!
Having said all that, dedicated handheld gaming devices are great! And I still considet Nintendo Switch a handheld, so they are still out there -/native handheld gaming consoles.