The sad loss of the true handheld experience
Our pocket companions are leaving something behind.
With the rise of PC-centric handhelds entering the market with Valve’s Steam Deck, ASUS’ ROG Ally and Lenovo’s Legion Go — We’ve never had so much power in our hands. Yet I find myself missing something about the portables of the past, and it’s not just that I can fit them in my pocket.
After spending time with the Nintendo Switch years ago, I noticed a sad change in the way the system felt, the “true handheld” is undoubtedly a thing of the past.
It dawned on me when browsing the store, all of these difficult ports that developers spent blood, sweat and tears pushing onto the weak chipset of the Switch. The Witcher 3, DOOM 2016, and Hellblade are some examples of truly impressive ports. If you told me 15 years ago that you could play home console experiences in the palm of my hands I would’ve fainted with excitement.
Just like the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, the Switch to me feels like a (albeit low powered) PC, stripped back and made consumable to the mainstream market, yet there is some magic in that which is lost compared to the handhelds I grew up with.
The last “True Handheld” in my eyes was the PlayStation Vita, a truly impressive console at the time that was sadly mismanaged by Sony and left as one of those forgettable blurs in the memory of gaming.
The thing that sets the Vita apart from the Switch is that we saw developers tailor their games to the system — We didn’t see “impossible” ports of Uncharted, Call of Duty and Killzone. We saw their own unique titles, new ideas and spin-offs. We saw developers making games for the system instead of trying to stuff a home console game onto weaker hardware.
There’s a lot of games developed for these portables that truly fit the system they were played on. Gaming on a handheld is a different way to consume the medium, much like listening to music on your phone is different to listening on a proper Hi-Fi system, the different environment means you’re going to naturally digest it differently.
I see posts regularly of people playing games like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us, or Death Stranding on their Steam Deck, all proud to show the world that they’re playing through these narrative experiences for the first time, and I can’t fathom how you would experience a game like that on the go.
I think back to the PSP and games like Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, where the game is split up into bite-size chunks, easily playable on a train for 10 minutes and made to be consumed in pieces. Compared to it’s console counterparts which were longer narrative adventures. The console games felt like movies, while the portable games felt like TV shows, you could watch an episode or two before bed.
It’s a true shame that we’ll probably never see developers make games for a specific system anymore. Thinking back to the time Rockstar made Grand Theft Auto for the DS and how bizarre that feels now, it had it’s own unique systems we haven’t seen before or since, it was it’s own title.
The PSP GTAs were also a highlight, you weren’t just playing a port of Vice City crammed into the device in your hands, you were playing an entirely new game. A beginning, middle, and end to it’s own story. It had a system where you could buy, raid and defend businesses across Vice City, one of the most interesting bits of gameplay to me at the time that we still haven’t seen return to this day in their titles.
I feel that games being made for portables forced the developer to try new things. When you think of an exclusive nowadays there isn’t any real reason it won’t run on any of the other systems other than a business suit said so.
Imagine if we never got the portable Monster Hunter titles, or the incredible portable Zelda’s, simply because the developers had the power to cram the mainline games onto the portable systems? All of the incredible, creative games that would’ve never seen the light of day.
It’s worth giving a shout-out to Playdate, the dinky device with a 1 bit screen that promotes developers to create something unique given the limitations. It may not be a mainstream device like we’ve seen from the likes of Nintendo and Sony, but it’s a unique little system that alleviates the heartbreak of our long-lost portable past.
