PC with Sunshine, and Moonlight on your phone?

You can even get a mini Bluetooth controller or use a full size controller with a holder that holds your phone.

https://ohsnap.com/products/mcon-magnetic-controller

Here you go! $100 on sale from $150

While I admire the anti-advertising stance, there's a difference between obnoxious advertising and sharing something you like. Luckily, the fediverse is still niche enough that it doesn't have marketing agencies trying to blur the line yet.

There are a shit ton of handhelds ranging from a lot of budgets, wulffden made a great video about any that he could get his hands on.

Edit: Should have finished reading before I started talking, I see you already know about these emulation handhelds. I'll still leave the link up for anyone curious.

Micro transactions, sorry.

Yep, micro transactions

I sent it to them in a PM as well, when I made the original comment.

Plenty of decent games on Android, but the experience of platforms like Google Play, Itchio and Humble Bundle is abysmal. Google Play pushes this slopfest iirc since Android 2 at least. Itchio has too much noise and too little browsing filters. Humble Bundle you'd be lucky to find a game with a notice that is too old and likely won't work on modern devices, the rest being kinda just there, forgotten.

For me at least, the best you can get out of a phone is emulation and source ports. But without a dedicated controller, experience can be rather cumbersome while playing too. In fact, a small tangent to show the point, the ebook reader I most prefer is a PS Vita homebrew simply because it is made to use physical controllers and works fantastic at that while not having to have the fingers cover parts of the page, even if the reader itself may take literal seconds to load the next page.

But besides that, I also miss the novelty of a portable console, or even from any consoles before they became somewhat standardized glorified boxes. The absolute unit that is the Saturn, the (truly) slim PS2 and the PSP whose loudness helps greatly at troubleshooting while their libraries do the most for their hardwares' quirkiness, the DS, 3DS and Wii having multiple screens for reasons, whatever Sony was going for with the PS Vita but that worked out fantastic (plus it was still relatively small)...

Meanwhile, the Switch and NS2 are rather basic, clinging to brand name, some exclusives, and barely having competition. But things like positioning them on a degree to play I can do with any no-brand screen, general library there are those portable Linux devices and stretching a bit the Raspberry Pi, and so on, and tinkering with these devices, not being as standard, brings some of the novelty back.

Besides, back at the initial point, I've seen console-like PCs a bit smaller than a Vita, like the R36S, making for a nice portable and pocketable experience. Though these are from my experience just powerful enough for retrogaming, which would lock you out past a certain point in time. So at least for now, I think those handheld PCs should do as replacement, but I would for sure gaming hardware to go back to that more novel and pocketable way.

gameNative (emulator of steam on android)

!?

This is the first time i've heard of it, imma try that right away

I agree, but I think it could be a biiit wider. Especially if we add some analog controls. Personally I think somewhere around DS lite size.

Not really for the screen size just for grip comfort

You’ve got small pockets

I think it was smart phones which killed the handheld market, but the switch matches your usecase well and there are plenty of handheld devices on aliexpress (usually emulators.) However you might be giving the games that worked on small screens a little too much credit. They were good for what they were at the time, but hand helds were mostly good for puzzle like games, and a lot of platformers did work in a severely cut down fashion.

TBH laptops becoming a dominate platform probably had a major impact too on handheld devices.

But I do strongly agree with the touched upon idea that graphics and 3d platformers/fps has been a major cause of the general decline of diversity in gaming, in a way that even impacts indie. It feels like make design itself has decided there isn't anything better than a FPSRPG.

Is any of those a mobile first game? Besides, I totally get this complaint of op's

Nothing I hate more than playing a game designed for a controller on a touchscreen.

Oh! I’ve never cared to distinguish. I just have a controller, a setup that works for me, and I haven’t given it much thought besides.

I think that may actually be a bit crass of me, but I didn’t really consider other people when I was trying to figure this out.

Insofar as good mobile-first pay-money-and-get-game games, my favorites are A Ticket to Earth, SOULVARS, Slice and Dice, and others, but I can’t be sure because I don’t have an easy way to check release dates of iOS games against their Steam counterparts. I’m a 41 year old woman who’s on a photography expedition at the moment.

At the end of the day, does it matter though? Play what you want, on the device you want, and enjoy the remainder of the four thousand weeks you started with. :)

There's still good ones. You just have to look hard and ask around. I wouldn't recommend it on smaller phones, but there's a port called "Dungeon Clawler" that's a blast. Then a great and super hard free game called "Shattered Pixel Dungeon". Another called "Earn to Die". "Merge Maestro" is also a lot of fun.

I can never find a good source for what those games are, and more often than not they're a game I already have on PC that just happens to have a mobile port. Like what am I going to do, buy Slay the Spire a third time since I already have it on PC and Switch?

Despite having a smartphone for over 15 years, I've found maybe a handful of games that are mobile games primarily that are also full fledged games that aren't slop. There's probably more out there but no good ways to find them. Mobile gaming is heavily overrepresented by freemium and gacha games and players, or people suggesting indie games that exist on other platforms.

Another big issue with smartphone gaming is platform decay. The stores require you to constantly update or your game gets kicked off. There are tons of great games that have no legit way to play them, and others are completely lost with no backups existing. I have some games on my phone I can't delete without risking losing access to them altogether.

Meanwhile I can go put rhythmn heaven in my gba and play it right now.

My kid is a Nintendo Game Boy Advanced SP connoisseur. I've looked into modern versions like the Miyoo, but after getting two broken in a row trying to get a Christmas present together I gave up. GBA-SP still works thpugh!

All good, thanks. I should have guessed based on context, but my brain just couldn't parse it 😅

My Steam Deck lives in my backpack and yes, i would have taken it to the airport.

There are good mobile first games, but you definitely need to cut through the slop to find them. One thing that helps is just completely ignoring free games and looking at the actual paid ones. Then skip any games you are aware of that are on other consoles, because those are likely to be ports (which to be clear, are often great, but not if you are looking to avoid controller touch controls as you are).

Some of my favs in the past have been Card Thief, and every other game by the same dev; most of Kairosoft stuff, though they did a free to play period of releases so I'd avoid those; Monument Valley; Reign and its spin offs; Vampire Survivors, even though it's free; Professor Layton series even though they are ports; there's others, this is just off the top of my head.

Sounds like a you problem.

Basically that Thor Android gaming device with two screens. You don't even need to use the second one if you don't play that kind of games, but having the option to do stuff like put tutorials on it is amazing

That supervision thing reminds me of the N64 / GameCube era of link cables to connect your Gameboy with its cartridge to the TV. Or why not Dreamcast cassette games which supported using the cassette as both a second screen and a portable game.

Nintendo DS did a lot of things right including supporting easy wireless multiplayer, but that roaming-to-couch playstyle started to fade a bit in a way the Switch isn't reviving.

I suppose what we really need is an offline complement to online matchmaking. People have more games in their library than ever but there's no discovery. You don't know who around you can join a session of which game.

But we could actually implement that these days much more easily, we can even do it with fancy cryptography to prevent tracking and privacy problems, just some means of pseudonymous Bluetooth advertisements, game library matching (look up PIR / differential privacy), then lobby creation when the players have accepted. And for friends you could have recognition of when friend are near. Federated game ID servers for fancier stuff like tracking achievements, or why not for scheduling gaming sessions in advance.

We can save [gaming], we have the technology

I'm pretty sure someone made pants to make the Steam Deck or similar pocketable...

Jokes aside, if they were pocketable, you couldn't run modern AAA games on them, then gamers would non-stop whine about it. You can still get some pocketable handhelds with Android OS (or a Chinese fork of it), and likely that will be my next portable device if Google will go through with closing down the Android ecosystem, and my S23 Ultra will go bad.

For phones I recommend emulators. Games from 30 years ago were less likely to have microtransactions, DLC, and all that bullshit

Weird take, retro gaming communities are huge and new hacks/mods are released often.

I want to promote !sbcgaming@lemmy.ml and !sbcgaming@retrolemmy.com because they need help with just being alive lol

I've thought of stealing some content from the sbcgaming sub and transpose it here with some of my thoughts but I don't have any of the boutique consoles so I don't think I can last

Have thought about doing something similar too in a few other comms that exists here in the threadiverse but far eclipsed by their counterpart in reddit. But I'm too lazy

It's already happening. Check out gamenative and winlator. Russ also have covered this various times

And with Valve releasing the Steam Frame and their Lepton and FEX compatibility tools, I hope it's going to supercharge adoption

https://www.techspot.com/news/113337-valve-publicly-releases-lepton-fex-compatibility-tools-power.html

Others have covered various points with better words than I can, so I'm going to share a website that is covering mobile phone games releases. not affiliated in any way

https://minireview.io/

Is was developed and maintained by a youtuber covering mobile games. Although he haven't uploaded to youtube in a year. And I don't usually check the site so it could be outdated.

And I see mobile ports of pc games are taking more care in translating physical controls to touch screen controls. Still not the rule and definitely the exception, but it is out there. Latest one I remember off the top of my head is balatro and ballxpit.

Case in point, I've been playing Pokemon Lazarus, a free, fully featured, Pokemon ROM hack that's just as good as any mainline Pokemon game, on my Miyoo mini

People are really sleeping on how good the Switch Lite is. It's cheap and built like a tank. It's perfect for chucking in a backpack because you dont have to care what happens to it.

I'm not doing that with my Analogue Pocket, nor my former Switch 2. I returned it because the build quality was a joke. The screen scratched at nothing and the device bent under its own weight if held in one hand. Terrifyingly cheap for the price point.

Gamenative with FEX + Wine already works on Android, and if you want to do direct Linux you can copy the work from the Steam Frame which also does all that plus offering Android app compatibility via containers

Even Android itself can be emulated. But that doesn't save games with online dependencies

Why bother with just a Steam Deck when you can fit a whole PC rig in there? 😂

Dang,most posts on !sbcgaming@retrolemmy.com are over a year old with no comments.

GUESS I BETTER CHANGE THAT.

It's an impressive collection and that's neat but also...I just can't imagine having the time to enjoy all of those. It'd almost be stressfully overwhelming choosing which game to play on which of 20-odd systems lol.

This could be blamed on game developer brain drain. These are low-powered devices, and they need people writing game logic to have some idea of hardware-level efficiency, not let a 500-feature engine do the work for them.

There’s no way to remake these devices without them taking up oodles of power, thus burning a hole in your pocket. Phones come close (it’s damn impressive what visuals Gacha games can achieve on phones) but even they are losing efficiency with time.

You kids and your microtransactions and Deal-Cs.

When I was your age, we would go to the mall with a roll of quarters and feed them into into big TVs with plastic guns hanging off the side. You'd shoot at the screen and the screen would shoot back. Every game cost a quarter. So we'd say "3 lives for a quarter". They would sell you blue soda in these big cups called "Freezies". And you could get a pretzel the size of your arm for a dollar.

Can't do that anymore. On account of the woke.

All of this could be so easily fixed if only we had linux phones. I'd like to just have my entire steam/gog/itchio libraries just on my phone as I've already bought those games and I should be able to just play them on the devices I already own.

I adore my RETROID Pocket Flip v2

Same for phones.

In addition to that, I'd also add that modding a 3ds is exceptionally simple. It also helps give access to nonnative software and mods to make your current games more fun (i.e. randomizers). I still play my 3ds, since it has my all-time favorite game, and I can still play a lot of my backlog.

https://commodore.net/callback/

Of those games, I could see The Witness, Stardew, and maybe Transistor and Ball x Pit working well with a touchscreen considering their perspective, pacing, and simple controls. Seeing this, I’m tempted to get The Witness on my phone to try.

It weirded me out that it didn't have XY buttons.

I mean, the GB Color and Advanced didn’t have them. The Advanced just added L and R, and the SP was the same, but more compact with a backlight.

That's cool and all, but but I don't get the relavence.

tight

It's a pocketable Linux phone.

No SNK, WonderSwan or GamePark on sight. 🤷‍♂️