Gaming Handhelds

[Jarhead0331]

Do any of you guys use these? The market has gotten pretty competitive. I had some spare holiday money and decided to pick one up for when I'm traveling or on the road. I was going to instinctively just pick up the steam deck oled when I decided to start doing research and my decision became very complicated. Many users were raving about the Lenovo Legion Go and since the 1TB version was on sale at Best Buy, I decided to give it a shot.

I'm still getting it set up, but so far I'm on the fence. The best thing about the steam deck is its native use of the steamOS, which people rave about. The Legion and its closest competitor, the Asus Rog Ally X are both windows based. This is both a pro and a con, for obvious reasons. However, both the legion and the Ally can run steamOS through a program called Brazzite, so they can have the best of both worlds.

In any event, the learning curve for me seems to be getting comfortable with the controls and learning my way around the device. Seems like a powerful tool for the money, but I'm not sure if it will grab me to the point where I want to play when I'm not on the road.

[al_infierno]

I have an older model Steam Deck LED, and I still play the hell out of it.  It's perfect for certain games like Balatro or Vampire Survivors which are just better fit for chilling back on the couch rather than sitting upright in your office chair.

I do sometimes play higher fidelity games on the Deck like the Yakuza series, or survival and horror games like The Long Dark and Amnesia: The Bunker (respectively) which generally don't rely too heavily on precision aiming or complex screen management.  These games are still generally better suited to a PC with keyboard and mouse or a controller, but it's nice to have the option to play it in bed or on the couch.

Tempted to upgrade to the OLED, but for $500 when I mostly play higher fidelity games on my PC, it's hard to justify the cost.

[Jarhead0331]

Part of the fun was going through my steam library and seeing which games are totally supported with controller support. There were some pleasant surprises in there. The Go has some interesting features. The controllers can come off of the tablet like the Nintendo Switch and the right controller can be used as a mouse. It's not particularly ergonomic, but it beats using the track pad or traditional thumb stick controllers for FPS games.

The challenge for me is going to be in trying not to treat this like a mini-desktop PC (ie. Laptop). I ordered a 12-in-1 dock, so theoretically, I could plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. But, I realize this starts to defeat the purpose. I even considered buying a gaming laptop instead, but elected to go with a gaming handheld because I wasn't planning on doing anything other than gaming with it and the handheld is therefore more practical from an economic standpoint.

However, just in case, this is part of the reason why I chose a windows based device. I knew it would support those features and the games that would need them.

[Jarhead0331]

Does anybody use XR/AR glasses? They seem to really enhance the handheld experience, but I'm not entirely sure how they work or what they do...

I'm talking about units like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DDNW8F5W/?ref_=pe_122214630_1168081130_AGH0503IMG_cor_ci_mcx_dl_2p_3_lm

[SpaceGameJunkie]

I'm something of a handheld nut. I currently have:

Switch
GBA SP
Modded 3DS XL
Modded PSVita
Analogue Pocket
Hand 386 (it's a portable 386 PC for the curious)

And I just got a lovely Android gaming tablet that so far I've been able to emulate PS1, PS2, PSP, PSVita, GameCube and Dreamcast games on it.

[Jarhead0331]

^Daaaaaaaammmn.

I'm pretty impressed with the performance of the Legion Go so far.

Have any recommendations for must play games that work really well on the handhelds?

[SpaceGameJunkie]

Ohh the tablet I just got is a Lenovo Legion, the Y700 2023 model specifically. I got that one after seeing heaps of recommendations online.

I'm relatively new to this, but so far the games I've been super impressed with are:

Strike Fighters
Undecember
Diablo: Immortal

I've also had a lot of fun with:

Warplanes: WW2 Dogfight
GRID Autosport
Anima

Much of my time with it has been testing out the emulation, but I have a lot of other games I plan to try out.