In the days and ages of handhelds that play every system from Atari 2600 to Nintendo Switch, you may find yourself having a harder and harder time deciding what to actually play. Only to end up spending more time scrolling through your lists or tinkering with your handhelds to actually play a game. But what happens if, rather than getting every game for every system, you had a handheld that just covered one thing?
There are a few videos out there that cover “the best handhelds for each system,” and while I’m going to do a bit of that, I’d love to get into the details of why you might actually want to go that route. Or maybe why you want to buy a handheld that was built with a specific platform in mind to begin with. So what is the purpose of a dedicated platform experience? And is it worth your time to go this route?
Enough Dedicated Handhelds?
When it comes to why you would do things this way, there are a couple of options to pick from. “The original hardware just works better.” If you’re looking at systems that were a bit strange in how they were set up, this may be true. I still stand by the idea that Nintendo DS and 3DS will always remain the best experience on their original hardware. The dual screens were needed for a reason, and in their respective libraries, they were used to their fullest extent. Minus a couple of games, of course.
“You won’t get paralyzed by choice.” Depending on who you are, this may be true. You don’t have hundreds of games across dozens of platforms. You’re given games that work for just one platform, brand, or experience. The closest experience to that in my collection is the Anbernic RG ARC, which has become my dedicated Genesis/32X/CD handheld. Those are my only systems and games, but even then, I sometimes find myself having a hard time deciding what to play. So, in my case and probably many of you as well, you may have to find yourself condensing even your game selection.
Official Dedicated Experiences
Excluding Nintendo Switch, if you’re looking for a truly dedicated experience without having to set up the emulators yourself, you still have a few options. My personal favorites in the modern day are the Playdate and the Evercade, both of which are systems I’ve reviewed in the past. Though I wouldn’t mind talking about them again. But to keep things simple, I’ll only talk about what makes them special.
“Evercade Fixes the Choice Paralysis”
If you don’t purchase an EverSD to load a bunch of games in, the Evercade helps fight the difficulty of choosing by forcing you to play what is on the cartridges you’ve bought. If you’ve got the Duke Nukem cartridge, you’re playing one of those games. If you’ve got the Indie Heroes 4 cartridge, your selection of games is limited to those. Because you have to purchase your cartridges and keep them physically around you, your choices become inherently limited to what’s around you.
If you purchase a lot of cartridges, you’ll start to find the choices more and more difficult, but the experience of pulling something off a shelf and popping it into your system is an experience you don’t really get to experience much anymore in an emulation handheld economy.
“Playdate Gives You the Truly Unique Experience”
Similar to a DS or 3DS, the Playdate gives you an experience that you can’t really find anywhere else. Its lower-res, monochrome, non-backlit display is something most people can only relate to the Game Boy, but with more modern games that you won’t find on any other platform. Oh, and it has a crank.
With its growing marketplace and expansive side-loading community through platforms like itch.io, you have a modern handheld experience with most features you’d expect of more expensive devices that you just won’t be able to get on cheaper handhelds of the same size.
However, the downside of the playdate is the same as the Evercade. You have to pay a lot more for it. The Playdate starts at $179 for a refurbished model directly from Panic. You’re dangerously close to RP5 pricing at that point.
What Do I Do?
For a lot of handhelds, I’ve begun relegating them to a dedicated experience. The aforementioned RG Arc takes on my early Sega library. A built-up Funnyplaying FPGBC takes my dedicated Game Boy/GBC experience. I even kept my Anbernic RG34XX, though now it’s the RG34XXSP, to take the mantle as my dedicated GBA so I wouldn’t have to worry about damaging my SP or Micro. What about everything else, though?
One major point of separation that I make is actually with my x86 handhelds. I generally refuse to do anything outside of PC gaming on them to avoid falling back into the trap of tinkering with my emulators on every last device I have. Because of this, I’ve kept my AYANEO 2S on Windows for those older PC games, and my AYN Loki Max stays on Bazzite for a lot of the lower-end PC games that I can just dig right into. And outside of the Odin 2, I don’t touch x86 on anything else either. But that’s just x8,6 unfortunately.
A majority of my handhelds still manage a lot of different systems, and I’m not afraid to admit I put too much on all of them as well. I’m never going to play one of a hundred different SG-1000 games. As it stands, if I could only have one handheld right now, I would pick the most powerful thing that could play as much as possible, which at this point would be an Odin 2 or 2 Mini. And the only reason for that would be to have a wide spread of systems. However, as an unfortunate handheld hoarder, I’m given the opportunity to make these decisions to spread things out.
What Should You Do?
MagicX Zero 40 playing arcade classic Dig Dug in TATE mode
Probably not. If you have just one handheld, or maybe a couple of Corpos and an emulation handheld, make the most of what you’ve got. Play your dedicated handhelds, use that Game Boy Color, or mod your 3DS. But if you are a hoarder, and you’ve got 20 different 3.5”, 4:3 handhelds, you have the space and ability to create handhelds that do just one system you actually want to play.
You could also be like me and go as far as modding your handhelds to be better for that one system. I was a maniac and removed the sticks from my RGB30 to make it the perfect PICO-8 handheld for me. The choice is yours to make, based on how many devices you want to own. But I think the biggest thing to remember.
If you can’t trim your systems, can you at least trim how many games you’ve got? What one man needs that many Barbie Adventure video games for their handhelds?
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