games

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.

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.

Just put emulators on your phone and use something like this

i still regularly play my GBA on long car drives

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.

Wait his battery was full when they got on the plane but dead mid-takeoff?

Press X to doubt

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

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

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"

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.

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.

maybe try growing larger hands?