The summer heat takes us all hostage, and even with the current health situation, there are probably going to be quite a few people taking some time off for a vacation somewhere. And what’s better than your trusty Switch console to spend time during those long sunbathing sessions? You could play Crysis or something, maybe even continue Divinity 2 from your Steam save. But as we know, it wasn’t always like this.
The Switch may have changed things now, but for many years, the question was always the same: what compromises have to be accepted once you go from a power cord to batteries? (let’s ignore super bulky gaming laptops, they don’t look like the kind of thing you could easily enjoy on the beach)
Far lower power and less buttons at your disposal meant that developers were generally unable to simply port console games on a handheld. This was perhaps unfortunate at times. While your mates at home were enjoying Super Mario Bros 3, your Gameboy Color had to do with Super Mario Bros Deluxe and its reduced screen view. And this problem continued long into the next century. Got a DS? Fine, have a Super Mario 64 upgraded port with worse controls.
Even when we got slightly more powerful handhelds (the PSP made a valiant attempt for sure), devs knew that you could only do so much with six buttons and one stick. When you think about it, the PSP tried to sell itself not as offering console games on the go, but “console-like” games. There’s quite a bit of difference. Generally, “console-like” games were seen as simply not good enough. So we get handheld games instead, and those were the true bread and butter of portable consoles.
There was a third side to this story though. Sometimes, when they were going to launch their next big thing, publishers wanted to cover the games market as much as possible. This meant including handheld consoles. But how would they do that, when handhelds could never run the same game? Sometimes it was just a port of an older game (Ubisoft knew this all too well, see for example Rayman 3D or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on the 3DS), but other times it was a spinoff game. And those were usually way better.
For an example, did I say that Ubisoft knew this all too well? They also knew about the other possibility, as shown by Prince of Persia 2008 and its DS spinoff, The Fallen King. While they are in the same continuity, more or less, the two games couldn’t be more different. One is on rails, the other is a proper platformer. One doesn’t let you die, the other is all too happy to kill you for a failed jump. One has a snarky girl as your sidekick, the other has a moody and serious dude. The DS spinoff even resembles the original series more due to the prince’s white outfit and a few returning setpieces (timed door switches, potions, etc).
Since portable spinoffs were given a lower budget, they almost never looked as impressive as their console cousins. Often times they weren’t as good either, since the publisher would get a less experienced team to work on this side offering. The Fallen King has many faults, though ultimately I enjoyed it more than the console version. In the end, outside of the AAA realm, devs were probably given more freedom to experiment.
The Switch may have changed things now. Let’s that Doom Eternal will look obviously downgraded from the console versions: it will be the same game. That is the reality of today, and it’s clearly better: no surprise the Switch is selling so much. But let’s not forget the time when handhelds couldn’t keep up with consoles, and instead of giving up, they sidestepped their limitations to give us something completely different.
A Few Steps 