#399: Pocket monster

Until very recently, the modern wave of Android-based emulation handhelds had rather passed me by. I’m not much of a handheld guy these days, really: my Switch 2 is permanently docked, and my Steam Deck lives in a drawer somewhere with a persistently drained battery. I work from home, have a lovely big TV in my office, and rarely see the point in swapping to my reading glasses to squint at a small screen in my lap when there’s 55 inches of OLED right there waiting for me. And while I admire and respect emulation at a conceptual level, I’ve always found it a dreadful faff, dealing with naming conventions, folder structures, BIOS files and all that.

Mostly, though, I ignored these things because I didn’t understand them. Their manufacturers had off-puttingly weird names — Retroid, Anbernic, Myoo — that sounded more like dropshipped Amazon slop brands than serious hardware companies. The devices themselves had silly names too, going by random alphanumeric strings or named after Greek gods. And these companies were simply too prolific. There seemed to be a new device from one of them every week. It was all too much for my poor old head to cope with, and since I wasn’t that interested in what they offered, I pretty much pretended they didn’t exist. It was just easier that way.

All that changed, obviously, with the arrival of Hit Points’ retro summer, which I’m delighted to say has persisted into retro autumn. With my personal collection of consoles long since brought down from the loft, and updated where appropriate with modern conveniences like SD card loaders and wireless controllers, I still found myself yearning for a few classic games I was unable to access. I fancied replays of Aladdin, Castle Of Illusion and Quack Shot, but my childhood Mega Drive is long gone, and the one I bought at a car boot sale 20 years ago never worked. (In any case I’m out of spare power sockets, and already have too many SCART cables to swap around.) I was desperate to replay some Game Boy Advance classics, especially Advance Wars and Treasure’s exquisite Astro Boy: Omega Factor, but refused to do so on the DS — that wasted second screen just makes me so sad — and while I don’t remember ever getting rid of my SP I can’t find it anywhere. I needed like five seconds on eBay to disabuse me of the idea of buying a replacement. That shit, like all the other shit, is just too expensive.

They say ignorance is bliss; what they don’t say, but probably should for the benefit of ignorance's brand-marketing, is that it also saves you money. I have learned, over the last couple of months, that the reason the likes of Retroid and Anbernic pump out all these new handhelds is that there’s a slavering community of people who seem to buy every single one of the fucking things. The SBCGaming subreddit, in particular, is filled with people who fell into the rabbit hole long ago, and despite the ever-growing body of evidence remain convinced that the most recently announced handheld, with its slightly improved processor, fractionally better screen and subtly repositioned D-pad, is finally going to be the shovel that lets them dig upwards. They talk in hushed tones about their mythical, perpetually hypothetical ‘endgame’ device; the one with the perfect marriage of form and function, that satisfies their every need and finally releases them from their torment — a special kind of hell that involves morosely refreshing Chinese parcel-tracking websites and getting very good at applying screen protectors. These poor sods, sleeping on their beds of Snapdragon processors, dreaming of their endgame handhelds. There but for the grace of god, etc.

Lucky me: by ignoring this stuff for so long I have come along at the perfect time. I now own exactly one Android handheld, and have magically loaded straight into the endgame.