Last year I travelled alone on a flight from London to New York. The flight officially takes around eight hours, but from the time you get on the plane to the time you leave it’s probably more like nine or ten. As soon as I sat down in my assigned seat I took out my fully charged PlayStation Vita. I was playing the visual novel Norn9. I recommend it. Once I started to play, the man next to me decided to grab his Steam Deck, Valve’s ostensibly handheld console, before the flight.
He was storing his Steam Deck in his backpack that was sensibly stowed away in the overhead locker. As people were still shuffling down the aisle, there was a little hubbub getting the portable console to his seat, but with a few minutes of struggle it was secured. He sat down and turned it on. I noted that he also had a full battery. After some browsing through his library he settled on Hogwarts Legacy. After this I remained absorbed in my story until I heard a sigh.
I turned to the noise to see that his Steam Deck was dead. The sigh was not only because his Steam Deck was dead, not only because it can’t be charged from the weak plane USB chargers, but because we were still mid-take off and he couldn’t put the handheld away until the seatbelt sign was turned off. He wrestled a little to grab his headphones from the seat pocket in front of him with the Steam Deck teetered awkwardly on his lap. It was impeding him from doing anything else. Eventually the sign turned off, he put the Steam Deck back into the overhead locker and I never saw it again.
lol. The stupid fucking behemoths we get now instead of something actually usable.
Look, I have absolutely no hate against the Vita, I think its a great device.
But this comparison is ludicrous.
A steam deck can emulate a PSP or Vita.
I know because I have one and I do this.
Was the SteamDeck guy a moron for thinking he could get away with playing Hogwarts Legacy for a 9 hour flight without it dying?
Yes.
But this is ludicrous to compare to a visual novel on a Vita.
Steamdeck dude easily could have made it the entire flight playing a visual novel.
Or… any emulated game from about the PS2 era backwards.
Or any modern 2D game. Or any modern isometric 2.5D game. Or probably any 3D game that isn’t from the last 5 ish years…
… If rendered at the same resolution and settings jammed all the way down to the minimum, on par with Vita graphics.
Or he could have also undervolted his deck, used power save mode, turned off his WiFi, underclocked his GPU.
Almost all of that can be done from a menu that is accessible from a single button press.
If the dude had brought his actual proper steamdeck charger, yeah, airline chargering ports are often underpowered, but it would trickle charge enough that he could get away with a lot less optimizations / lower graphics settings, and survive a whole 8 or 9 hour flight.
I again know this because I’ve done it with an even shittier charging port on a fucking 24 hour Greyhound bus ride.
…
Yes, the steamdeck is a big beefy boy and doesn’t fit in a pocket.
It isn’t meant to.
There is little point in making such a small gaming device these days, basically outside of retro niche do it cuz you can startups (more on that below)… because most modern smart phones are powerful enough to do everything a Vita can do, if you set it up for emulation, or just natively play android games.
If this person has a modern smart phone, there have been many 3rd party basically controller mounts that plug in and surround a smart phone to turn it into basically a mini deck or mini switch/2… those have been around for almost a decade.
That is where all the development has been in basically pocket sized handheld gaming, for the last decade-ish: smartphones and accessories.
Remember everyone playing Pokemon Go?
Whatever gacha waifu battle simulator is currently in vogue?
That is the majority of the money making in gaming for the last 10ish years.
That is the majority of played video game hours on Earth, in the last 5 to 10 years.
The mobile gaming market is larger than literally every other platform combined, and then some.
…
But hey, if you are looking for a handheld, portable, pocket compatible device:
https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/
Here you go, there’s a list of all the things you’re looking for, a bunch of small, fairly recent startups who don’t have marketing budgets so apparently the author has never heard of them.
…
If this person (author) wants to blame someone or something for the lack of standalone, portable, handheld gaming devices… tell them to look at how obscenely greedy and manipulative the entire mobile game market is, all using dark patterns and MTX to suck money out of mostly children and give them addictive personality disorders.
That’s your culprit.
The author mentions having a VirtualBoy, so we can reasonably conclude they are in their 40s or nearing them, at least, and probably has just absolutely no idea that shitty cellphone games are not just common, but literally dominate the world wide video game market.
Out of touch.
You said everything I wanted to say, so bravo. I just really want to emphasize this point again:
There is little point in making such a small gaming device these days, basically outside of retro niche do it cuz you can startups (more on that below)… because most modern smart phones are powerful enough to do everything a Vita can do, if you set it up for emulation, or just natively play android games.
Seriously, I used to run n64 emulators on my phone from like 6 generations ago. I bet they can probably run them in 240hz in 3D now if you want. If all you want is a small tiny portable handheld gaming device then buy a USBC or Bluetooth controller/dock for your phone and never look back.
The steam deck and the switch are the only viable future for dedicated handheld gaming because they actually bridge the gap between portability And console gaming.
I think I actually first played uh… Gen 3 Pokemon, I forget the names… yeah, played them on a smartphone back in 2015, had been using ZSNES on PC since forever to play ChronoTrigger and such… hell, I remember ‘playing’ Pokemon Gold on some emulator… before it was even released in America.
I say ‘playing’ because 9 or 10 year old me could not read Japanese at all, rofl, and nobody had translated it yet.
EDIT: Oh, right also worth adding:
A good number of these newer emulator focused devices, focused on retro gaming?
People do actually make entirely new games, for GBC, GBA, NeoGeo, whatever, that are only distributed for free, as … new games designed for retro hardware.
So there are in fact new handheld retro games, if that makes any sense, and many Emulator wrapper or emulator adjacent programs just show them to you as downloadable in their ‘market’.
I remember emulating Gold/Silver before the US release, too. Though I swear I had some English translation that had your rival say “damn” and that was the coolest thing I could imagine.
I’m stapling your steamdeck screen.
Oh, well that would suck for me because it is currently my only computer.
I took that 24 hour Greyhound ride because I was homeless, SSDI finally kicked in, shelters full everywhere, found a shithole I can afford to rent and not die of exposure over a thousand miles away.
I don’t even primarily use it for gaming, at the moment, due to sustaining massive injuries from being homeless… I use it for things like submitting forms to the SSA, trying to get food stamps, trying to challenge all the fradulent charges on all my stolen credit cards, setting up food delivery because I am crippled, can barely walk with a cane, and have no car.
Its a pretty useful device.
Stop that. You’re making it hard to hate you.
I genuinely cannot tell if this is some kind of bit, or if you just irrationally hate steam decks for … some reason?
I think they’re trolling and changed target to the steam deck because switch 2 hate wasn’t bringing in a reaction.
… or its an intentionally ironic name?
???
nah they’ve been this salty since they made the account.
After some browsing through his library he settled on Hogwarts Legacy.
Shitlib needs to play their poorly optimized terf wizard game to bring back their shitty 2000s nostalgia that drained their battery. Its not the device but the g@mer.
Just put emulators on your phone and use something like this
Not doing that. De-Redditize your mind.
It’s a good as hell solution though. My phone is already a perfectly good computer that can play up to PS1 era old games and pretty much all modern mobile ones, why should I buy another?
I jingle with each step as if I’m wearing spurs on my boots. Upon my belt a modified set of Nerf N-Strike Elite hip holsters and a WonderSwan Crystal, a model 1 GBA, and a Neo Geo Pocket Color. I can draw each one in under 0.75 seconds. Inside the dart holders: enough AA batteries to game for over 72 continuous hours.
I game where I please, out on the range, down at the spittoon, in my domicile while I’m stewing up a chili.
Have fun with your little phone thing there. I guess.
Oh what’s inside the bindle at my side? A Sega Game Gear and the 366 batteries it needs to run for 8 hours.
Like the old gunslingers of the west, your long arm and side arm use the same ammunition.
Exactly.
How would you play PS1 games on a phone though?
I have Lemuroid and a few Gameboy games but that’s pretty much it. I don’t really know how to figure this out.
Install RetroArch for Android, download game, done.
Okay, now, dumb question with a hopefully simple answer. Where do you download the games? Thank you!
There is one other step: downloading a file called scph5501.bin that you can find by searching that filename. It’s the bios file for the playstation and the emulators can’t include it because of laws but it’s pretty easy to find yourself.
You can get the games from a torrent site or by searching “ps1 iso nameOfGame”
Check out Myrient or Vimm’s Lair. Full disclosure, this is piracy.
I’m glad I realized everything I wanted on a portable PC, my phone already did. Great screen on a small form factor, Wifi 6 for Steam Link/Moonlight and good power/battery ratio.
That said I miss the days when I could play Flash games on my phone (unless maybe the modern flash emulators have patched that in? i haven’t checked in a while). That was literally the killer feature that lead me to buy an Android over an iPhone way back when.
You can play Flash stuff using Ruffle
The thing is, the HUDs menus and graphics of these games are increasingly just ports of PC games, meaning they weren’t designed for a small screen in mind. If you played Hogfarts Legacy on a Vita it would look terrible.
In the pre-Switch days portable games were made specifically for the portable console in mind. Menus, controls, everything, even the fucking sound chip.
It’s just more enshittification
imagine having to actually do good software design
You could not run Hogwarts Legacy on a Vita at all.
A Vita has 512 MB of RAM.
Hogwarts Legacy (PC) requires 16 GB of RAM, minimum.
There is no amount of porting optimization you could do to get that to work. The system architectures are simply way too different, in so many ways… RAM is just a useful simple comparison to illustrate the magnitude of the game-rendering-ability power gap.
That’s like asking a Gamecube to run Fallout 4.
Not gonna happen.
In both these cases, if you attempted to somehow backport these games to thise devices, what you do is make a completely different game from the ground up, as was done back in the old days with many games that would release on multiple consoles.
They would often look and play completely differently across different consoles, and of course some games are just impossible to make cross platform.
Like uh, another example; there’s no practical way to make PS1 FF7 run from an N64 cart.
Just not enough storage space in the N64 cart, even if you cut out literally all of the cutscenes.
Evidently, the FF7 team actually looked into an N64 release, as an N64 Disk Drive peripheral was being developed… but it would have taken them 30, fucking 30 discs to run it on the N64, and the N64 also could not handle the number of polygons they routinely had on screen, without chugging and overheating.
You could not run Hogwarts Legacy on a Vita at all.
I think they’re not talking about the technical specs, but the UI and screen size.
Good portable games need to be designed as good portable games - they need to be made for screens on portable devices and they need to be designed to be played in short bursts on commutes or whatever.
Portable games aren’t really designed anymore.
I mean yes, they are, and I’m just yes-and’ing it with another set of factors that would complicate the problem.
Also, see my other, longer comment:
The vast majority of both played video game hours and revenue/profit from videogaming…
Are from mobile smartphone games.
Its been that way for 5-10 years.
Smartphones are the largest video gaming platform in the world, and absolutely tons of them are made and updated every year.
Portable games are absolutely designed and refined all the damn time, even if you don’t like playing them or consider them real games for whatever reason.
For some reason, this just… is a blindspot for many people, who don’t consider smartphone gacha games to be ‘real games’… when they have been the biggest, most widely played, and most profitable gaming platform for nearly a decade now.
Its like saying there’s no way to get around town because cars are too expensive and public transit exist blows… and just forgetting that the vast majority of the world uses mopeds or motorcycles, in areas where owning a car is generally prohibitively costly, and you also need the ability to go further and faster than you can with just a bicycle.
I remember when I could carry my 3DS in my pocket and street pass people on my way to and from work. Good time good times.
i wish the vita succeeded. i never owned one but it was so cute and portable. the FOSS console of the future is vita-sized, so shall I say when i finally get my turn on the lathe of heaven
You can get a vita-sized handheld portable console running Linux right now
Self-modutizing and banning your comments from my thread if you don’t shut the fuck up about Linux.
Go ahead. Say Linux one more time.
OOOOOOO IM GONNA TUUUUUUUX
You can get vita sized handheld consoles running GNU :)))
I’m putting two staples in your chest and one in the head execution style.
Really, on AliExpress or something? How’s the gaming support for that, even if only for old-ass games like Fallout: New Vegas?
Aliexpress handhelds are mostly intended for retro console emulation. Apparently you can use Winlator to play New Vegas on something like a Retroid Pocket 5 though
I’m curious what buckycat was talking about though, because it’s been a while I haven’t played any games on account of my laptop being absolute dogshit, and not having a TV that I could plug into an old console. So a cheap handheld running Linux sounds like a great option, even just for home gaming. Not a huge fan of retro games, though. Especially because I play them on my phone.
There are small cheap Linux handhelds, but those are pretty weak and definitely aimed at retro gaming.
Gotcha… Maybe one day I’ll pick up a used steam deck.
New Vegas isn’t oldThe cheap retro emulation handhelds are up to about PS2 emulation right now.
Anbernic and Powkiddy are two of the most widely used brands of them, there are more models than you can shake a stick at.
Lol I was in college when NV came out, it just feels like so long ago.
I’ll look into them! For some reason, when I think “retro” I stop at SNES or GBA emulation, and forget that the PS2 is more than 20 years old.
NV in particular barely runs on hardware it was actually intended for.
There is a thing called Portmaster that can make both actually old PC games like Fallout 1 and 2 as well as lightweight modern games like Balatro or Stardew Valley run on these contraptions. Its device compatibility list might be a starting point.
There are also youtubers like retro game corps whose whole job is extremely detailed reviews of every new handheld game contraption that comes out.
it was so good
i still regularly play my GBA on long car drives
Thank you.
I’ve never really had an issue with the size or shape of the Steam Deck and i was able to play Elden Ring for a few hours on the train the other week without running out of charge, while being far more portable than a laptop that could do the same. Yeah it’s much bigger than most handhelds, because it’s a mini PC and can play full PC games rather than being limited to a smaller/different library, it’s not really in the same league as the PS Vita. That being said it would be cool if smaller handhelds made a comeback.
This feels kinda like comparing an iPad to a regular phone and saying “see, it’s too big to be a good phone”
That’s it. I’m issuing a fatwa steamdecks in addition to Switch 2s. Get stapled.
let me have my handheld supercomputer damnit
no
Wait his battery was full when they got on the plane but dead mid-takeoff?
Press X to doubt
Is 90 minutes too much to go from boarding to takeoff? I don’t know how planes work
There are literally dozens of models of new handheld game machines in every conceivable shape and size. This article’s entire premise rests on only considering the largest and most expensive ones.
And none of them play new games, which is the point made here.
Because you can’t squeeze the guts of a modern console into something Vita-sized? The PSP and Vita didn’t play full PS2 and PS3 games either but cut down ports optimised for their hardware. The most top-of-the-line modern phones are extremely powerful but from what I understand they overheat and have a similarly limited battery life.
People should just play old games anyway
THAT’S THE POINT. THEY DON’T MAKE PORTABLE GAMES ANYMORE. EVERYTHING IS JUST PC GAMING, PC GAMING ON CONSOLE, OR PC GAMING ON HYBRID “PORTABLE”.
An entire branch of game design is gone.
Smartphones killed handheld gaming. Even the first Switch just had regular console games you could take on the road
Yeah there are plenty of handheld games being made right now they’re just all mobile games. Dig through the slop I’m sure there’s gems in there.
Sure they do, using portmaster.
There are also plenty running Android that can play modern mobile games, whatever you may think of those.
maybe try growing larger hands?
Getting surgery to get Tom Cruise Tropic Thunder hands
It surprises me that handheld consoles don’t usually have different size variations for different hand sizes. Like, it makes sense for there to be one for little hands (especially for children) and a standard normal sized one.
I have large hands, and I feel this way about phones. I haven’t changed my Samsung S10 in like 5 years; in part because i’ve been different kinds of broke throughout its life, but also because it’s literally the last phone i’ve seen that I can hold and use with one hand comfortably. Everything else requires pianist-like fingers or 2-handing. When it inevitably poops the bed, i’ll get a refurbished S10 again, because it’s just perfect for me.
