Cheap Retro Handhelds: A Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] a minute. What is the current cost of a modern video game system? of a modern video game system? 600 for a PlayStation 5 slim, 900

[00:14] for a PS5 Pro. [sighs] So, in a world where a PlayStation costs that much, does cheap gaming hardware still even exist? The answer is yes.

[00:32] little thing called Cheap Week, where we have both videos and articles detailing ways you can save a few bucks for a hobby that is becoming unsustainably expensive. The big mainstream video game consoles have only gotten more expensive

[00:47] over [music] the last few years. But if we're talking cheap hardware, it's impossible to ignore the retro emulation market. This is the Iono [music] Flip 1S, Iono Air Pro, Pocket Ace, Pocket DMG, Pocket DS, Battle XP, G350, the Mio

[01:04] DMG, Pocket DS, Battle XP, G350, the Mio Mini, Amberick RG Nano, RG28X, RG34XX, RG35XXH, Retroid Pocket 2, Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, Retroid Pocket 5, Retroid Pocket

[01:16] Classic, Retroid Pocket [music] Flip 2, the MU Mini flooded with seemingly a new retro handheld from a Chinese manufacturer

[01:31] like what every every day, every week. Like they're they're they keep coming. >> Retroid Pocket Nova. >> And there is something that these retro handhelds are offering that hasn't been available for consumers in video game

[01:43] available for consumers in video game hardware for a really long time. Choice. It may be a joke that there are hundreds of these devices, but that is also the beauty of them. There's a device of every flavor, of every color,

[01:58] for every person, and for every price point. We have the big boys like the tick- tockably popular in 4, which can go all the way up to like 400 bucks. But then on the other hand, we have tiny little devices that can do pretty solid

[02:12] little devices that can do pretty solid emulation for under $50. There are devices that make them kind of niche in the grand scheme of things, but with everything being as expensive as it is

[02:24] and these devices being as cheap as they are, it's kind of impossible to not pay attention to them at this point. And yet, I've never owned one. But that changes today. If I'm going to talk to you about these little retro handhels, I

[02:38] obviously need to try one. So, I did a bunch of research, watched a lot of videos, and tried to find a device that I was the most excited for, and also was on the cheaper side. For me, [music] cheap means like under $100. And I found

[02:53] the perfect little device, and it should be arriving today, hopefully, any minute now. I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting I'm waiting for it here. So, um, waiting for it here. So, um, yeah.

[03:37] uh 35XXSP. [music] Catch you in. This is a retro emulation handheld modeled after the original Game Boy Advance SP. [music] It cost me about 55 bucks. Uh when you add in tax and

[03:54] shipping, it ended up being a cool $80, which is still 20 below the original MSRP of the Game Boy Advance SP. Now, I know what some of you are about to say. Hey, isn't this the older model? Didn't they just put out a brand new one

[04:10] like two weeks ago, like a slimmer size and like a different screen and stuff? Yeah, they did. And guess what? I bought this thing 2 days before they announced it. Yes, I'm a little salty about that. But

[04:24] the good news is this thing is [music] pretty much identical in terms of the actual hardware inside of it. uh that N version is more of just like a a refresh with a couple of quality of life stuff and they're basically the same price.

[04:38] So, uh everything I'm about to talk about with this little guy [music] applies to the new version. So, if you end up liking this thing and want to should go with the new one. Or maybe not because this one actually has a slightly

[04:52] bigger screen which might be more appealing for certain types of gaming. Because this thing [music] runs entirely on emulation, you need to provide your own ROMs and put them on an SD card. [music] There is no cartridge slot to uh

[05:06] Advance games. That's what makes this thing different from something like say the Analog Pocket. That thing is designed [music] to put in OG cartridges. But enough talking about the device. Let's load this thing up. Don't

[05:20] worry, I brought my own carts. the thing. Game Boy and Game Boy Advance

[05:34] games obviously looked and ran great. [music] A really nice touch of this device is that they actually have a little Game Boy [music] Advance SP bezel for Game Boy Advance games when played through Retro Arc. SNES games all ran

[05:48] great and look pretty decent on the screen. PS1, [music] N64, even Dreamcast games all ran pretty well on this system. One of the stranger systems it offers support for is DS. [music] You actually change which screen you're

[06:03] seeing using the bumpers. Obviously, this is going to be incredibly limited this is going to be incredibly limited to only like certain DS games, but I was kind of surprised how well that worked. However, realistically, I'm never going

[06:16] system. In fact, I'm probably not going to play any of the 3D systems at all because uh this thing does not have got the version without them because I really bought this thing primarily to

[06:30] play handheld games. I also want to praise the usability of this system. It is incredibly simple to load your games into a PC and then you just take the

[06:44] ROMs you want and you put them into a folder for that system. The interface is also very functional. It's nothing to write home about aesthetically, but it's very easy to understand and get the job done. Overall, I'm just extremely

[06:57] impressed at how userfriendly [music] this device is. But me being me, I had to tinker with it. So, I brought it [music] home and started messing around with putting some custom OSS on this thing. There's a surprisingly large

[07:12] amount of options and really it all just comes down to [music] personal preference. I ended up going with MinUI. It's a very sleek and minimal UI. It actually reminds me a lot of the way

[07:24] Analog does their UI for their systems. I like it a [music] lot. MinUI also goes really well with the sort of minimal approach I'm taking with this system as a whole. Now, I could just load this thing up with hundreds of games. That's

[07:39] like these systems, but I've always found that if I have too many games on at once, you end up with that like weird uh choice paralysis where you don't really [music] know what to play or you're just bouncing between multiple

[07:52] games and you're not really engaging [music] with anything. So, instead, I like to put at most three to four games on this system. The games I'm going with [music] because I'm always in the mood to play a

[08:06] little bit of Tetris, Metroid Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance, which is one of my favorite games of all time. And the third game is something a little special. This is Pokemon Yellow, but not just any

[08:21] version of Pokemon Yellow. It is running on Gen One Recomp. For those of you unfamiliar with what a recomp is, the short bad explanation is that they are short bad explanation is that they are native ports of classic console games.

[08:36] version of these games. It still requires a ROM in order to play, a ROM that you ripped yourself off your own cart. There is a whole list of options. And also, [music] there is mod support. There's actually a very large and

[08:51] healthy modding community [music] around this thing. The most famous of these mods is the dramatic shape voxil mod. You might have seen this floating around actually got me to notice this recmp in the first place. Unfortunately, the

[09:05] Voxil mod does not run great on this hardware. It's okay in indoor environments, but outside it slows down pretty significantly and [music] sometimes just straight up crashes. For myself, I'm keeping it simple. I picked

[09:18] up a achievement mod, which I think is kind of cool. And I'm changing the color to advanced mode, which makes the game look like the Gen 2 version of Kanto from Pokemon Gold and Silver. But enough talk. I got to get to work.

[10:03] >> Can I get a regular plant chowder, please? please? >> Thank you. [music]

[10:17] every day for the last couple days, and the thing that has surprised me the most about it is how often I find myself pulling it out. I'm playing it on the bus. I'm playing it on the walk to work. I'm playing it while waiting for my

[10:29] lunch. I'm playing it while watching some trash TV with friends. And I'm some trash TV with friends. And I'm playing it on 5year anniversary dinners.

[10:44] this little guy. And that shouldn't be that surprising. It's a handheld. That's its whole purpose, right? But what's interesting is that I have other handhelds. I have a Steam Deck. I have a Switch, too. And I love those devices. I

[10:57] use them all the time at home on my couch. I would never take those devices out with me in public. I find them far too [music] bulky and expensive to want to do so. This confirms a feeling I've had for a while

[11:11] now where despite the [music] fact that we live in a golden age of gaming handhelds where we have these incredible PC devices [music] that can play AAA games and we can take them on the go with us. Those devices

[11:25] are so big and so [music] bulky that they don't actually feel conducive to handheld gaming in the same way that a device like [music] this does. This is a true handheld device that I can put in my pocket and

[11:38] [music] take out wherever. It kind of proves that Nintendo really nailed it. This is like peak handheld [music] form factor except for the DS. That's also peak handheld form factor, but that's a that's a different video. So, at the

[11:53] beginning of the video, I made a joke about how the PS5 here is so expensive and you should just buy one of these little handhelds instead. Now, obviously, [music] these two devices aren't really comparable. This is a

[12:07] little tiny [music] retro handheld device, and this is a AAA machine video games. Only one of these is going to be able to run Grand Theft Auto 6, [music] and it ain't this guy. And yet,

[12:20] that gap is not as wide as you might think it is. When these handheld retro emulators came out, they were designed [music] for just that, retro emulation. And yet, in the last couple of years, these things have seen a new purpose.

[12:36] Playing actual legitimate modern [music] video games thanks to amazing programs like Game Native, which let you load your Steam library on Android [music] devices. That kind of functionality is relegated to the more expensive

[12:51] handhelds that can run Android, not this little guy. Uh, in retrospect, I probably should have bought one of those devices to test that functionality out for this video, [music] but I was really committed to the whole cheap aspect of

[13:06] this whole [music] thing. Uh, but here's the weird part. This little guy, despite its small size and small hardware, can actually run modern native games [music]

[13:18] and its own weird little way. Thanks to community efforts, there [music] are hundreds of games that you can play on these little devices. The way it works is very similar [music] to uh how I did the Pokemon Gen 1 Recomp. You download

[13:33] the port folder for the game in [music] question, and then you go to your legitimate copy of the game on Steam or [music] GOG or wherever it may be. You grab the specific files that you need for it that they ask for, put them into

[13:46] that port folder, [music] and then you bring it into your system and run an patches [music] everything together. It's kind of crazy the games that are [music] available for this thing. I mean, Grand Theft Auto

[14:00] City, HalfLife, that's ridiculous. No, I did not put HalfLife on this thing. As cool as that would be realistically, I wanted to stick with games that actually made sense for this platform. and I was going to play

[14:14] games like [music] Undertale and Delta Rune. These games are surprisingly perfect for these little handhelds thanks to their already square aspect ratio and visuals that scale really nicely to small handhelds. The text can

[14:30] [music] be just a little hard to parse at times, but otherwise, these games feel surprisingly right on these little guys. A game that feels absolutely perfect [music] on a handheld, to nobody's surprise, is

[14:43] The person who ported this did a lot of work to resize the entire [music] experience to perfectly fit the screen of the RGSP. It really does feel like I'm playing this version of Bellotra that comes from this alternate reality

[14:58] where it existed [music] at the same time as the Game Boy Advance. Unfortunately, not everything was as easy to get up and running. There were a lot of games that just straight up would not work no matter what I tried. Perhaps

[15:12] the most disappointing one for me was Void Stranger, a Sokubon puzzle game whose aesthetic mimics the original Game Boy. It is perfect for this handheld system. And unfortunately, I just could not get it to run at all. That was a

[15:27] accept the fact that [music] these are all communitydriven efforts, not proper native ports [music] by the developers. I consider this entire thing uh very

[15:39] experimental and more of a bonus. It's not why I would go out and buy this thing in the first place, but it's pretty damn cool you can do it. [music]

[15:55] cheap price point makes this [music] and many of the other retro handhelds really easy to recommend. I think in a world where video game hardware is getting more expensive, more locked down. [music] People are getting priced out of

[16:08] it. Having alternative hardware like this that is cheap, [music] that has a large community support around it, that allows you to mess around with it to make it your own, uh, is really important [music] and I'm really glad

[16:21] important [music] and I'm really glad that little devices like this exist. have, uh, a retro handheld device like this little guy uh, that you want to recommend to folks, uh, go do so in the comments. There's like a so many of

[16:35] like this isn't going to be the the end all be all. There there's going to be a device for you somewhere. You just have [music] to you just have to find it. Oh, and go check out all the other cool uh cheap week stuff that we're doing here

[16:48] going up in a day or two where I uh put together a little potato PC uh that'll run you around $150. You would be run you around $150. You would be shocked at the games you can run on that