handheld

All things handheld for gamers on the go; featuring Gameboys, PSPs and much more.

I Almost Bought the Wrong Gaming Laptop on Double 11. Here’s the One I Chose Instead.
On a Tuesday night, Chen’s old laptop fan started rattling like a scooter with a loose panel. He had two weeks until Double 11. He opened three tabs: a repair quote, his bank balance, and a laptop listing page. The repair shop wanted 480 yuan for a new fan and thermal paste. He paid. Then he started reading.
By Jin2 days ago in Gamers
Phantom Blade Zero's 88 Isn't a Disappointment. It's Exactly What Chinese Games Needed.
The completion screen read: 36 hours and 25 minutes, good ending, 89% total collection. The reviewer noted that "thanks to the thoughtful map guidance, I took far fewer detours," so those 36-plus hours almost all landed on solid ground. Put that next to a Metacritic score of 88 and an IGN 9, and my judgment is this: it meets expectations, but not the expectation of flawlessness. It meets a harder one: that a Chinese action game has finally reached the international genre benchmark in its core experience.
By Jin2 days ago in Gamers
Why "MMO Is Outdated" Starts a Fight Every Time
"Why won't WOW players admit that MMO no longer fits the times?" The question presupposes two things. First, that "MMO no longer fits the times" is an ironclad fact. Second, that people who play MMO refuse to admit it because of emotional investment.
By Jin2 days ago in Gamers
AI Got Crushed by Slay the Spire’s Hardest Mode? I Looked at the Data, and the Headline Falls Apart
200 runs. One win. That is the full record of 20 large language models against the final boss on Slay the Spire ’s A20 difficulty. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and GPT-5.6 Sol trade places atop other leaderboards. Against the Corrupt Heart, their combined win rate was 0.5%.
By Jin11 days ago in Gamers
Phantom Blade Zero’s 66 Days Mode Is a Death Clock the Developers Can’t Beat
At Tokyo Game Show 2026, a 4Gamer reporter asked Liang Qiwei whether anyone on the development team had cleared the “66 Days” mode without dying once.
By Jin12 days ago in Gamers
Buy-to-Play Isn’t Always the Better Deal. My Steam Backlog Proved It.
Many players say the same thing: buy-to-play games are a better deal. At first, that sounds obvious. Free-to-play games cost nothing. Buy-to-play games cost money. How could the paid option be cheaper? Then you play a few free games. You see how they work. Free is the entrance. Inside, gacha, skins, battle passes, monthly cards, first-time recharge bonuses, limited bundles, and seasonal quests pull money and time out of you through thin pipes.
By Jin13 days ago in Gamers
Why DNF Stopped Being Fun (It's Not Nostalgia)
You're sitting in Grandine. One full fatigue bar is gone. A few fake purples lie on the ground. You don't pick them up. In your storage, you still keep the chainsaw, the flamethrower, the Ice Dragon greatsword you dropped back then. Back then, when a boss pink dropped, you could type three lines in guild chat, hands shaking. Now you open the equipment dictionary. Those things are still there. No one talks about them.
By Jin14 days ago in Gamers
We Beat Video Games Before the Internet. Here’s What It Actually Took.
Blow on the Cartridge, Keep Banging into the Wall The TV was convex, with a layer of dust on the screen. Summer afternoon, the fan spinning, the cartridge hot in my hand. I was stuck on World 4 of Super Mario . I’d been down every pipe, stomped every Koopa, the flagpole was on the right, but I couldn’t clear the jump in the middle. I tried twenty times. On the twenty-first, I fell into the pit. Mom called me for dinner. I didn’t answer.
By Jin14 days ago in Gamers
Sony Locked the PS5. Hackers Found a Key. Players Are Stuck in the Middle.
On September 29, 2026, an exploit chain called Relapse became public. This was not a minor security incident. Attackers combined a WebKit browser vulnerability with a kernel-level aio_multi_wait UAF race condition. The result gave them kernel-level physical memory read/write privileges on the PS5. Every official firmware version from 7.00 to 13.60 was affected. That range covers the original fat model, the Slim, and the recently released PS5 Pro.
By Jin14 days ago in Gamers
My Top 25 Lynx Games
The Atari Lynx was a notable also-ran in the original handheld console war. The Game Boy dominated the market, the Game Gear trailed behind in second. Of the original three main competitors, the Lynx came in a distant third. I think it did a little better in the UK than in most places, though. I know a few people in the early-to-mid-forties age bracket who have fond memories of it. My flatmate, who is much smarter and cooler than I, was a Lynx girl, and still champions the cause. I knew at least one kid who had a Lynx back in the day, and got the chance to play on it a few times. I can’t for the life of me remember who they were, but I do remember the console. In retrospect, it was way too big and unwieldy for a handheld, but to the small me the size and weight of it just made it seem more impressive. This was a grown-up’s machine.
By Daniel Tessier3 months ago in Gamers
What Happened to the 'Mega Man' Series?
With its long history and many games, the Mega Man series may at first appear to be a wildly successful franchise up there with Mario and Sonic . However, despite its recognition, the Mega Man series only has a few games that sold more than one million copies worldwide. Even the best-selling Mega Man game Mega Man 2 sold only 1.5 million copies worldwide. This fact made me wonder how the Mega Man series could be so well known but rarely be the success one would expect from a long-running franchise.
By Yaw3 months ago in Gamers
The Legacy of 'Mega Man Battle Network'
With the release of the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection in 2023, there appears to be a renewed interest in the RPG series. However, this resurgence has yet to result in Capcom reviving the series with a new entry. Indie games inspired by Mega Man Battle Network , such as One Step From Eden , EndCycle VS , and Berserk B.I.T.S. , attempt to fill this void with their similar battle systems and card-collecting mechanics. Unfortunately, none of these games has perfectly recreated the appeal of the Battle Network series. Enter Shanghai EXE: Genso Network and Mega Man Battle Network Chrono X , two existing fangames that continue where the series left off.
By Yaw3 months ago in Gamers