Handhelds: But Look at All This SPACE!

I noticed the title for the weekly C-blog musing and thought could I really be bothered to write about a favourite/worst handheld? I couldn’t be. In the end, I’ve decided to do something a little different. Instead of a sharp focus on the chosen subject, I’ll attract your attention over to the area a handheld doesn’t cover, as well as all the bonuses. That is, all that empty space that would otherwise be taken up by a home console.

It may sound like a stupid idea, the very thought of lugging a home console in the open air. Whether you wanted to show it off at work during break-time so more fun could be had playing Halo with your work-mates or taking it to play games around a friend’s house…it was a little inconvenient. In a rucksack, on a bicycle for several miles, or sitting it on the seat of your friendly public transport, you either had to carry extra things you wanted in your pockets or have another backpack that would make you look pregnant/overweight/overloaded.

No, no, no. That will not do. A handheld games-console is the way to go. Put one up against your home console. Go on, do it. Look at the difference in siiiiiiiiiiiiiiize. Look at the difference. Now think about how much stuff you can put in your bag now that you have something that still can play games, but smaller. Granted, you still need to bring games and a charger in the event of the handheld losing power, but even with those items, you still have more space.



Now, I put a comment forward in a debate about whether handhelds would overtake home games consoles in the major part of the industry. I decided (and a few members noted) that handhelds, since they couldn’t do the things that the home consoles offered (a movie experience, decent controls for one-on-one fighting games were a couple of standards that handhelds still fall short of) would be a smaller, if not equal force in the market rather than the dominant.

We don’t stay at home all the time. Since we love gaming, we can’t bear to be without some semblance of our pastime during periods when we haven’t got anything to do, and handhelds fill that gap. But what quite a few negative nancies are spouting are comments in the above paragraph. They can’t do this. They can’t do that. We should have had robots that cleaned our grotty bedrooms like Tomorrow’s World said, but we have progressed to this, etc. We all nod our heads sagely. However, I feel that continually comparing what handhelds can’t do against their home counterparts is like putting small children next to fully-grown adults, and telling everybody that they will criticize the kids for not being able to hold their own in a pub-brawl. We know they can’t, but that’s because it is not their modus-operandi. They were made that way.



But you know what you can do with them. You can fit one on the extremely tight luggage quota or take it on board a plane for your holiday without much hassle. You’ve got the rest of the space to cram more stuff you want to relax with. You are not encompassing an area of your friend’s or relative’s living space with one. You already have it in your hands, in the event someone wants you to go downstairs and considers a cut in the electricity will spur you on to get your food. You don’t have to be stuck in the same room all the time or fight over the use of a television with someone to play with it.

And just to make you aware, the paragraph above was about handhelds, not small children.