Favourite: Steam Deck, hands down. It has totally revolutionised the way I play games. I very often choose to play games on my deck instead of on my far more powerful pc.

Least favourite: Smartphone. The closest I’ve come to having an enjoyable traditional gaming experience on a smartphone was Sky: Children of the Light but even then I was constantly getting frustrated with the touchscreen controls and dealing with my phone getting as hot as the surface of the sun. Its also just not a comfortable shape to hold while you game.

My favorite is honestly my PS5. The load times are fantastic and I love the feel of the controller and the rumble / adaptive triggers. I also fucking loved my PS Vita, to bad it had such a mediocre run games wise.

Worst is pretty harsh, as I have loved all my consoles. But there’s no denying that the PSP was a bit garbage with its single analog stick (which was also very hard to use).

Dishonorable mention. One of those “99 in 1” things with the weird LCD. Really shit dpad, the thing didn’t even have tetris

Am I the only one who loves the Switch? That the joycons come off and even have their own shoulder buttons is so cool. You can just set it on a table and play some multiplayer Mario Kart, heck yes. And they snap into the ring fit circle thingie! Neat! And the Pro controller is great all around.

Shout out to the DS Lite. Loved that thing. Gotta have the thumb strap to play that Metroid multiplayer FPS.

Worst: TI-84. How the hell they still charging over $100 for this thing, when it has less processing power than a Palm Pilot? Seriously the CPU is from 1976. Yeah Bubble Bobble and Block Dude are great, but the Zelda port runs awful.

I really enjoy all of Valve’s hardware. Others are mentioning the Steam Deck, which is great, but I also love (and frequently use) the Steam Controller and Valve Index.

I don’t know if I have a clear least favorite, as I never owned the things which interest me the least.

Going to stick with portable systems, because a box is a box is a box, even if some are cooler than others (PS2 slim with attached screen, and N64).

#3 Gameboy Advance SP

Loved the compactness of the clamshell design. So much more portable than other systems at the time.

#2 Steam Deck

Windows games on a Linux handheld, plus it runs old games that Win 10 can’t.

#1 PlayStation Portable

This was and will always remain my favorite gaming system. So many great games, movies, a cool disc/cartridge hybrid media format, SD card support for all sorts of stuff, custom firmwares… man, such an amazing system.

• SNES was the ultimate From childhood until the release of Nintendo 64
• In high school it was a PC with a mouse and keyboard.
• Now it’s a PC with an xbox controller. Using a mouse and keyboard reminds me too much of work.

There is a PS5, a Switch, and a Steamdeck, in the house plus several more devices in the garage. I’ll watch other people play but gaming on dedicated hardware just doesn’t grab me. I’ve never tried gaming on a phone.

Favorites:

• DS Lite: maybe it’s because it was my first gaming console I bought with my own money as a kid. But this thing is such a trooper. Looks beautiful clamshell and the battery some how is still good today, almost 20 years later. Works real well with game carts too!

• GameCube: I’m such a sucker for Nintendo but this thing was so portable and had a phenomenal wireless controller if you had it. I loved this console and the mini disks were so fun until I lost my case full of them.

• Switch Lite: I know this isn’t a common one but the weight and the power behind it is amazing to me. I’ve always wanted a super portable console that doesn’t weigh a lot. The regular switch hurts for me to hold too long even with grips.

Least Favs:

• PS2 slim: this little shit barely worked. At one point the slim would stop working where I’d have to open it, spin the disk like I was pull starting a lawn mower. It also scratched half my disks for no reason. The OG was a tank.

• OG DS: bulky pain in the ass. Felt like holding two GBAs glued together.

Least favorite - Joycons. They make my hands ache, and I hate that to enjoy my switch I have to have a 3rd-party grip.

Favorite - my Lenovo legion laptop, which has given me for excellent years of service. I’m going to upgrade to a newer model later this year and keep this one, install Linux on it, and make it a Linux-only machine for better privacy in using the Web.

Favorite:

• Nintendo DSi - The DS just had such an incredible library, with tons of unique titles you could never experience elsewhere. Though the sad thing about how unique it was is that… you can’t properly experience a lot of these titles elsewhere. Emulation just isn’t the same. While it came out very late and wasn’t worth upgrading to if you already owned an earlier model, the DSi was a very nice and sleek evolution on the hardware. Much more softmod-friendly too.
• Miyoo Mini Plus - Bought this last year on sale as an impulse buy. Ended up liking it so much I wish I’d bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. My ultimate dream is to someday get something that runs SteamOS in this form factor.
• My custom built fightstick - Put this together last year to replace my old Hori RAP4. Really happy with how it turned out! Love the GP2040-CE, I used to have to go through an adapter to use the HRAP4 on Switch and I can feel the difference not having that added latency anymore.

Hard for me to name least favorites, because I haven’t owned a system I actively disliked, and I don’t wanna just say CD-i or N-Gage or whatever. But I guess I’ll list ones that I have mixed feelings on:

• Wii - The Wii had a few great games. It also had a lot of duds. The saddest thing about it is how many games had to shoehorn waggle gimmicks in, and how few of them actually did it well.
• Steam Deck - As a Linux nerd that wants to see the platform grow, I love that the Steam Deck exists. It’s arguably the most important thing that has happened to Linux gaming. It just isn’t for me at all. It’s too big to be a handheld, I grew up on a Game Boy Color and I still love curling up with handhelds in bed, but this doesn’t feel cozy to play with at all. I do occasionally use it + dock as a portable setup I can take to FGC events, or when I have guests I’ll sometimes hook it up to the TV for Jackbox, but it mostly gathers dust the rest of the time.
• Switch - Great library, and the hybrid form clearly worked out for Nintendo just because they don’t have to divide their output between two platforms. But like the Deck, it’s not what I want in a handheld, mine doesn’t leave the dock. It’s also rather frustrating how many bad ports the system got, I wish developers would simply stop trying to port games it clearly can’t handle - especially when there are plenty of older titles in their back catalog that I’m sure could have good ports but get overlooked. And don’t get me started on JoyCons!

DSi introduced region locking to Nintendo handhelds. I stopped buying them at that point. The next Nintendo system I bought was the switch, which was no longer region locked. The DSi kicked that off, so it might be my least favorite.

Favorite hardware is a much tougher nut to crack. Could be my first console, n64, or my first gaming apparatus, the Gameboy Pocket. But the PSVR1 blew me away and made me a little less into flat games. The PS5 has everything I love from PS4 onward (and does VR), and the Steam deck streams my PS5 from bed while also playing pc, retro, and Xbox games and being a full on Linux machine.

Is that 3DS jailbroken? If not, you totally should.

Computer

Everything else is underpowered and gimmicky and overpriced with constant subscriptions to useless junk just to play a game.

Favorites

• Steam Deck
• Analogue Pocket
• My PC I suppose. Can do the most!

Least favorite

• DS-i: just a lot worse than the lite imo. The camera and the few dsi downloadable games were not worth losing GBA back compat
• PlayStation TV: had potential but was just a worse vita and mediocre streaming box.
• Piboy: a weird raspberry pi 4 based handheld I had by a company called experimental pi. It was actually kind of cool, but they had their own custom software needed to run on the screen and they were really bad about getting fixes out, and some patches would brick the machine iirc. The company seems to be defunct now. The website is a 404 now

Least favorite has to be a tie between switch joycons in general and the circle pad on 3DS.

Joycons on their own are too small to be all too comfortable disconnected and connected they’re slightly better since I can position part of my hand on the back of the switch, so there’s at least that.

And with the 3DS circle pad, it’s just nowhere near sensitive enough. Movements feel too quick, with little to no control over how far the pad move, in my opinion.

As for favorite, I’ll say that in general I absolutely hate track pads and everything they stand for, but steam deck is the only exception. With most track pads I’ve used recently outside of the steam deck, I have trouble clicking since the mouse buttons are built into the track pad and half of the time feel like they don’t work. Though with the deck I find it real easy to just click pretty much anywhere on pad and it’ll click for me.

Only problem I’ve had with deck pads is that sometimes the click is a bit too sensitive for me, so I’ll sometimes accidentally click while on the onscreen keyboard by accident or click while playing a game like Gemcraft, making me deselect a gem or power up while dragging over.