Where the hell are the batteries? A common phase I used to ask in order to progress my Castlevania Circle of the Moon save on my GameBoy Advance growing up. Or the need to take my hoodie off and drape it from my head to the passenger headrest in front of me, so that I could actually see the non-backlit screen on a sunny roadtrip. These problems haven’t existed for decades now as we have sacrificed true portability for handhelds that couldn’t even fit in the pockets of JNCO jeans. But it’s hard to complain about being able to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 30,000 feet in the air.
I have an incredibly doughy spot for gaming handhelds. Growing up while completely entrenched in console gaming with the PS2, that didn’t stop me from bringing my GameBoy Advance, then Nintendo DS, then PSP, then 3DS… everywhere with me. At the time the PSP felt enormous with a 4.3 inch display. But compared to its Nintendo counterparts, the performance and AAA development support made it feel like more of a home console on the go. I was able to play an entire Madden franchise season on a road trip to Ohio, or play Star Wars Battlefront on a local network with my cousins at Christmas. I would ultimately leave the handheld at home shortly after the Nintendo 3DS was released. It felt like the industry was leaning primarily towards a power hungry, graphically driven, home console experience. That was until Nintendo uploaded a Youtube video in the fall of 2016.
The Nintendo Switch would go on to launch in 2017 and revive my love for handheld consoles. This concept was one I had dreamt of, and remember fantasizing about with my buddy who had a WiiU. What if we could just play console games anywhere we went? Being able to slap controllers to the side of a console and resume what you were just playing on the TV blew my damn mind. Now the chipset in the Switch was about comparable to a 2013 smart phone, but Nintendo would work their magic to hide those cracks with first party titles until the Switch 2 released 8 years later. Every remake would feel like playing the game for the first time again. Skyrim for the 6th time? Of course! Because this time, it’s in your hands.
Valve would take that same philosophy of home power on the go in 2022, with the release of the Steam Deck. With their own operating software, Valve was providing a handheld (that requires a backpack to carry around) that can play almost your entire Steam library. For PC gamers and handheld enthusiasts, Gabe Newell just walked on fucking water. When you buy a new console, one of the worst things is that launch window where you have this new shiny toy and there is only one decent game to play. When this console arrived at my apartment it contained a Steam library I have been overbuying for since 2012. While the Steam Deck was criticized for its lackluster battery, it was at the same time delivering enough power to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and have it look just as good as when you first played it on the PS4. This power to portability dilemma is the new crossroads where portable gaming finds itself.
With the cascading success of the Switch into the Steam Deck, there are now dozens of PC gaming handhelds and a much more powerful Switch sequel. All of these hardware options have helped create demand in the market to increase support from developers. Coupled with the majority of development advancements coming in the form of resolution scaling, which make prettier games easier to run on less powerful hardware. Gone are the days of developers having to make two different versions of the same game for different hardware. This leads me back to previous points of now you have a Nintendo console and PC gaming consoles where you’re able to play your favorite AAA releases, indies, and everything in between, everywhere you go. Of course it’s hard not to harken back to the GameBoy where you played your first Pokemon, and say that it was your favorite handheld. But if I came to the bus stop with a Steam Deck playing Devil May Cry 5, your head would’ve exploded.
-Evan Kuhn
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