With PSP coming back portable gaming is taking over and I love it

Playing on the go was kind of the equivalent of having a mobile phone today. You could play whenever and wherever you wanted, as long as the batteries lasted (see, just like now!) and it was a great way to ignore people without being too rude.

We weren’t rich, so while I saw other friends with a Game Gear, and even a Lynx, I didn’t get another new portable till the PSP. I could’ve got a DS, but I preferred the better graphics of the PlayStation device, even if I admit now that the game selection wasn’t as good.

I loved the PSP, and later the PS Vita, but by the time of that and the 3DS it was obvious that portable consoles were falling out of fashion and many casual gamers no longer saw the point of them if they have a phone.

That never really made much sense to me because phones at that time were a lot more basic than they are today, but that’s how things went. Then Nintendo made the Switch, and it was both the death of traditional portables and the birth of a new type.

I love my Switch but the best thing about it is it led to the creation of the Steam Deck, which in turn led to the Asus ROG Ally and a ton of similar devices. Now we’ve got tons of copycats and there’s rumours of Xbox making a hybrid portable for the next gen and Sony bringing back the PSP!

My only concern is that back in the pre-Switch days portable games were usually quite different to ones meant to be played at home. A Switch or Steam Deck game isn’t made specifically to be played in handheld mode, it’s just an ordinary home game that happens to work on a portable.

I would like to see Nintendo and Sony create at least some new games that are made specifically to be played on the move, like they used to be. They’d probably only be smaller indie or download-only titles, but I’d appreciate the effort.

Other than that, I am ready to welcome back portable consoles from every company and ask why did you ever go away?

By reader Hordak