this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
140 points (90.7% liked)
Games
38452 readers
1709 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If anything, it makes me wonder why we don't have more small dedicated handheld gaming devices that aren't phones or pseudocomputers and don't cost a bomb.
Like a £220 PSP/GBA/DS-like device with decent first-party support would be really nice for me imo
You can buy handhelds for like $100 that have basically every console game up to and including ps2/ds preloaded. What else would you need?
Something that can play PS2/GameCube games effortlessly
Maybe even a bit of PS3!
Because we already have phones.
The solution is to release games for phones that require a controller, but most companies aren't willing to be the first ones to do it.
I'm probably part of the problem. I've never used a controller except a few times at friends' houses. I grew up with Nintendo DS, Wii, PC, and smartphone games. I don't want to ever have to pick up a controller.
With a phone, there's a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That's probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.
I've never had trouble with or resented touch screen D-pads ^^; again I am part of the problem I suppose, because it seems by your post that most people hate the things I'm genuinely satisfied with. I hope the general controller-liking population gets things to serve their needs too, though. Thanks for providing the information for what I'm assuming is the majority.
The Switch Lite is exactly this. $200 handheld that runs first party games. There are android handhelds like the Retroid pocket 5 as well.
A Steam Deck Lite would be incredible. Small, cheap, linux-based, and powerful enough to run indie games and some light 3D. I think that form factor basically needs an arm cpu though.
Yeah, I'm taking a look at the RP5 it looks quite good. I wish its GameCube Performance was better but this might be the one for me :D
If it can also play Steam games/x86 games, that would also be cracked
There are plenty handhelds in all shapes and sizes in that price range for exactly this. How many more do we need?
Or just use a phone that's a couple years old
Yeah, I got an S23 for $400, upgraded from a 7 year old S9
I'd say go on swappa and pick up an S21 for 125 and be ready to go....leave the S23 for doom scrollin.
Why downgrade?