Why is nobody talk about the portables war?

GigaBowser said:
many tried buuut nintendos undefeated in portable wars 8 GENS confirmed
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Well, you answered it yourself. Not much of a war if there's a clear winner for 8 generations. That's better qualified as "occasional uprising" or something.

BlackTron said:
Portable games used to be designed as portable games. Now the idea of making a game portable is taking a console game and running it on a slab.
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I do really miss the two independent markets. We did lose something with the merger of Switch.
 
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Susurrus said:
While I see what you're saying, there's lots of games that are clearly designed for a handheld experience that run on the Switch. Sure, you can play them on the TV, but they're clearly handheld games. Though they do tend to be indie games, but there are many really good ones.
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It's a shame that portable gaming software has been demoted from intense first-party support and large DS scale libraries to luck-of-the-draw on how text in indies are formatted.

One of the best things about those massive handheld libraries is that no one is done playing them yet so if you want a more portable system with nothing but tailor-made games, you can just keep using one.
 
HRK69 said:
You have no clue what I played on lol

But now "proper handheld consoles" need to have a certain screen size to be valid? Guess the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, DS, PSP, and Vita were all trash by your logic. Those consoles defined handheld gaming for decades, but I guess they weren't "proper" enough for your high standards

But tell me, Mr. Gatekeeper, what exactly is a "proper handheld console" by your elite standards?
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I don't think you understood his point.

His argument is that games meant for today's big screens are a poor fit for small handheld screens.
Most people don't want to play their cool 4K games on a 6" screen, just like most people don't want pixelated 2D games on the same system that can play the latest AAA games.
Portable games used to be made with the features and the constraints of handhelds in mind. The Game Boy wasn't about taking NES games and cramming them into that tiny pea soup screen as they were. Even when they did try, first on the GBC and then with 16-bit console games on the GBA, it didn't really work that well.
There's a lot of reasons the PS Vita failed, but a big one is that by that time, people weren't interested anymore in playing poor man's Uncharted on a tiny screen when the "real" thing looked so awesome on you 50" TV running on a PS3. Meanwhile, the 3DS was still worth it because it got bespoke games for it.

cireza cireza is saying that it would be nice to still have games that were specifically made for small screens, instead of big-screen games shrunk down and downrezzed to display on a current handheld, with all the cons that come with that. Xenoblade on a Switch or Elden Ring on a SD will do in a pinch, but nobody is going to play those games mainly in handheld mode.
 

Why is nobody talk about the portables war?

GigaBowser said:
many tried buuut nintendos undefeated in portable wars
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E Agora GIF by Musicasa
 
Ozzie666 said:
Analogue Pocket is amazing, clear winner right now in the portable debate.

On a serious note, Switch has kind of ruins the idea of portable gaming, I still love my Vita, and I wish there was a market for handheld games, specfically made for handhelds. I'd happily take a great portable at PS3/Vita or even a super GBA for 2D expereinces and psedueo 3D sprite scaler type games.
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Have you had a look at the modretro chromatic? It's my favorite Fpga and also the ultimate gbc

Or else, there's also the new ayaneo DMG. It looks fantastic, minus the unavailability and sky high price ..
 
No other console that I'm aware of has a handheld out that plays games without needing to stream them.

So, ya of course they are "winning". There is nothing to compare within the console space.
 
Why no one here talks about ? Because the real portable war was won by the iPad years ago.
 
BlackTron said:
Portable games used to be designed as portable games. Now the idea of making a game portable is taking a console game and running it on a slab.

It's great we're able to do that today but it came at the expense of actually portable games. Even Game Boy titles did a better job of making sure you could read the text.
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Hmm

Not entirely, for most of its life the GameBoy Advance was treated just like the SNES by Nintendo, and most of its big games were SNES ports.

I, however, would like to see more of the quirky DS style games on Switch 2.

I do think handhelds are slightly more suited shorter arcade style games though.
 
MarV0 said:
Are you talking about sales? Why would I care how many units the Steam deck or the Nintendo portable sells? It does not affect me in any way.

My Steam Deck has access to more exclusives and more games then all consoles and portables ever released COMBINED.

My Steam Deck will will also keep receiving new games way into the future. The Switch will be a distant memory and my Deck will still be supported.

I really struggle to see how any comparison can be made.
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This is bias though.

Your StarCraft avatar clearly indicates a long term preference for PC gaming.

The market has spoken though, they vastly prefer the Switch to these SteamDeck style devices.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Hmm

Not entirely, for most of its life the GameBoy Advance was treated just like the SNES by Nintendo, and most of its big games were SNES ports.

I, however, would like to see more of the quirky DS style games on Switch 2.

I do think handhelds are slightly more suited shorter arcade style games though.
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Even those ports were ports, customized for the smaller screen. Mario platformers were pretty much replaced with ports, but everything else kept getting new entries, IE yes GBA got LTTP but that didn't prevent Minish Cap.
 
I think the closest we have had to a portable war was when Sony dropped the psp. Was game gear competitive with the gameboy?
 

Why is nobody talk about the portables war?


Well haven't people here been hyping that new Pocket PC from another PC manufacturer on Windows 11 supposed to kill the steam deck and switch because it is so much more powerful? I recognize that fad died a bit, but it was pretty common some months ago.

Guess who went and who stayed...
 
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BlackTron said:
Even those ports were ports, customized for the smaller screen. Mario platformers were pretty much replaced with ports, but everything else kept getting new entries, IE yes GBA got LTTP but that didn't prevent Minish Cap.
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What I love about Switch is that Nintendo's 2D games that were previously reserved for handheld are now playable on TV.

Merging handheld and home platforms was a great idea, I love how we get new 3D Zelda one year followed by 2D the next, all on one console. 2D Metroid playable on TV too…

…and Pokemon!
 
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RetroGamingUK said:
Not entirely, for most of its life the GameBoy Advance was treated just like the SNES by Nintendo, and most of its big games were SNES ports.
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And the original resolution did not fit, so they had to put a toggle on a shoulder button to allow seeing the upper part of the stage. It wasn't as bad as Mario Deluxe on GBC, sure, but it still wasn't optimal.

In the meantime, games made specifically for the resolution of the console showed everything on screen at once, and obviously, this was a much better experience than having to toggle the view point up/down using a shoulder button.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
What I love about Switch is that Nintendo's 2D games that were previously reserved for handheld are now playable on TV.

Merging handheld and home platforms was a great idea.
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I agree it's a huge feature. I went to great lengths in the past to achieve it. Super Game Boy, Game Boy Player and Pokemon Stadium. While Switch makes it more accessible, it's not new.
 
cireza said:
And the original resolution did not fit, so they had to put a toggle on a shoulder button to allow seeing the upper part of the stage. It wasn't as bad as Mario Deluxe on GBC, sure, but it still wasn't optimal.

In the meantime, games made specifically for the resolution of the console showed everything on screen at once, and obviously, this was a much better experience than having to toggle the view point up/down using a shoulder button.
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Yes, but the screen size was to keep costs down. I certainly couldn't go back to anything smaller than PSP.

When I do play GBA games it's on Switch.
 
The only "war" I can think of is the PSP, which put up a decent fight but was still outsold like 5x, it set up things well for the VITA but Sony then fumbled that one hard by themselves.

After that the market split with phones taking away a large chunk and Nintendo adopting a hybrid scenario.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Yes, but the screen size was to keep costs down. I certainly couldn't go back to anything smaller than PSP.

When I do play GBA games it's on Switch.
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There are two different aspects.

1) Games being made specifically for the screen resolution (of the portable console)
2) Games having UI made specifically to be easy to read on the screen (of the portable console)

You can have a small screen and everything being perfectly laid out and easy to read.
You can have a big screen for a handheld, and yet struggling to read text on it.

You can play GBA on Switch, it is a great experience for sure. Because the Switch resolution can display the entirety of the GBA resolution. However, playing GBA games on a GBA SP was also a perfectly fine experience, despite the screen being smaller. As well as GB, GBC, NGP or GG games really. If we put aside the aging display technologies, the screen size, resolution and how games were specifically made for said resolution ensured that everything was always easy to read/see.

Then Darkest Dungeon on Vita happened (just picking this as an example), 3DS was discontinued and all of this was over.
 
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I fully agree with cireza cireza . I'm farsighted and some games are lazy PC or big screen console ports that got minuscule font. For example, God Eater 3 for Switch, there's so much text to read but it's really small, I just stopped playing it. Sniper Elite 3, another game with microscopic font, I just skipped all the background story and the mission briefings and just followed the radar map, personally that's an awful way of playing a game but I just couldn't bother trying to. Both Wizardry (Proving Grounds and The Five Ordeals), they also got really small font (Proving Grounds being the worst offender), however I love dungeon crawlers so I just eat it whole. Was it that hard to add a font size option at the very least? There are games which have good size out of the box and even so they let you make it larger (telling you that some text might get clipped), like Labyrinth of Zengetsu.

That's why I love NIS and Atlus games (the ones I played at the very least), those games are all about the story so the font is really comfortable to read, the HUD makes sense and is easy to navigate. Yes, the item list can only show 10 items per page but wtf, why you want to show 50 and have it look like Arabic in a handheld?
 
As the term "portable console" has degenerated, the perfect portable console was the GBA SP, small, foldable and easy to carry, not the huge gadgets of today.
 
Throwing rocks at the castle doesn't mean you went to war with the Kingdom of Nintendo Handhelds.

Only Game Gear & PSP can even be mentioned as opposers.
 
Actually there were quite a few games on PSP and Vita that got console ports.

(Playing videogames on a tiny shitty screen holds no appeal to me but then I don't have to work 60 hours a week. I can play videogames at home).
 
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To he honest, I don't really count switch as a portable. It feels too fragile and doesn't fit in your pocket like the gba or DS
 
David Ricardo said:
You answered you own question: if Nintendo is always winning in the portable market, what war is there for us to talk about?
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This.

Nintendo handhelds are like Nazi Germany and everybody else was Poland in 1939.

The closest anybody got was Sony with the PSP and it was still basically 2:1 with 154M vs 80M.
 
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Sony went to their strength of a home console, Nintendo played up to the hybrid nature to combine their two platforms. Smart choice for both of them and it's why I'm really doubtful either want to change much beyond that.
 
Because Nintendo already won that "war" even back in DS.

No other company can compete with Nintendo when it comes handheld market.
 
T8SC said:
Vita means life.
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This is probably a joke but the Vita is my favorite handheld of all time and the only handheld I still own and play.

The Vita could have had Switch energy long before the Switch. Originally the vita had video out and could connect to a tv. Hell even the PSP was a Switch before the Switch as they not only made a dock but had official Component cable available as well as being able to connect a DualShock 3 for tv play.
 
How can be a war when these pc/retro handhelds does'nt make their own games and mostly just expect piracy support.
 
Not much of a war, really. The Switch is the dominant handheld, and will continue to be so with the Switch 2.

PC handhelds are doing their own thing, and aren't really "competing" with one another like that. From what I've seen, people are more likely to own more than one PC handheld than just being tied down to a particular model. Hell, I use both a Deck and an Ally, and they don't step on either ones' toes.
 
hououinkyouma00 said:
This is probably a joke but the Vita is my favorite handheld of all time and the only handheld I still own and play.

The Vita could have had Switch energy long before the Switch. Originally the vita had video out and could connect to a tv. Hell even the PSP was a Switch before the Switch as they not only made a dock but had official Component cable available as well as being able to connect a DualShock 3 for tv play.
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Vita was great system problem was Sony just stop supporting it and before long it just became port machine, getting worse version of the most console games.
 
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