Best Handheld Game System

[Kresnik]

This is a weird one for me. I'm not going to actually vote for anything, not least because I haven't owned a 3DS yet.

I have, however, owned a Gameboy; Gameboy Colour; Gameboy Advance; DS; PSP & Vita.

I owned all the Nintendo handhelds pretty much as the came out, and never really got into them. I had Pokemon Red & Super Mario Land for the GB; Pokemon Gold, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem & The World is Not Enough for the GBC; Spyro: Season of Ice for GBA and Professor Layton & The Curious Village; Brain Training 1 & Mario Kart DS for the DS.

Honestly, I bought the systems (or rather, had them bought for me) pretty early in their lifespans with a couple of games, and I played those games and the system a bit and then got tired of them and never came back to them. Purely because I preferred home console gaming. Couldn't find any reasons why I'd want to play inferior games on a small screen when I could play full game experiences on a big TV.

Many, many, many years later I got a Vita, and it honestly changed my outlook about handheld consoles. Although, yes, the quality is still a step down from home consoles, it comes close enough that I'm happy now. I'm not ashamed to say that I'm a gamer stuck in the 6th generation really - graphics got good enough for me in the late 6th/early 7th generation and I no longer feel the need to chase stunning graphics like I did when I owned a PS2/GC. Vita achieves that level of quality and then some.

And it changed my outlook on other handhelds, too. I went back and bought a PSP and realised that the console was capable of pushing that kind of quality last generation, and I'd missed out on it. It made me dig out my DS to have another go, and I found I enjoyed the system a lot more than I remembered. It has made the 3DS my next planned console purchase, usurping the WiiU & PS4 which ordinarily would've been my next purchases.

So in a way, Vita will probably always be my favourite because it introduced me to handheld gaming which I now love (it's much more convenient; the quality is there; the Japanese devs are there; etc. etc.) when I wouldn't give it a chance before. But I've still got a lot more handhelds to explore before I'm done with them, so we'll see.