I don't think I'm wearing rose-coloured glasses when I say the industry is in a really cynical, exploitative state. The status quo now is that AAA games are no longer released finished and have a micro-transaction system baked in from day one, leaning on seasonal content and battle passes to keep the money flowing long after launch. Multiplayer games launch with servers that can't handle the initial load and then die out quickly. Highguard lasted 45 days, one of 52 games that have already been shut down in 2026 alone. And games are no longer optimized because (similar to web dev) game devs assume gamers are using beefy machines with huge amounts of free space. Unreal Engine 5 alone has become shorthand for stutter and slowdown no matter what you're running it on.

Also? RAM and GPUs are becoming genuinely unaffordable, with memory prices climbing as much as 89% in a single year as AI data centers eat up the world's DRAM supply. Microsoft and Sony have been raising console prices in lockstep, the Series X now costs $799.99, a $300 jump from its 2020 launch price, not long after Sony hiked PS5 prices of its own back in April. Microsoft is also closing even more of its game studios, that's 3,200 jobs and four studios gone in the latest round alone. Sony, meanwhile, announced the phase out of physical game discs by January 2028, with the PS6 being a digital-only machine, and Sony is also stepping back from porting its single-player exclusives to PC. Even Valve's new Steam Machine—over a thousand dollars for the base model—isn't a good deal at all. Would've been perfect five years ago.

Myself? I am a terrible gamer. I don't think I've ever actually completed a traditional game. The only games I do have over 100 hours in are Stardew Valley, Rimworld, Cities Skylines, Civilization III, and Balatro. Why does this make me terrible? Well, I hoard and collect like a magpie—my Steam library has over 350 games, most of which I haven't touched. (To be fair, a lot were purchased during the golden age of Humble Bundle when the lowest minimum purchase was $0.01).

Funnily enough, I've always been passionate about video games as a form of art. Back when Flash games still existed, I stumbled upon the Art Games genre on Newgrounds and was captivated. These simple games rendered such emotion in a young Brennan, and had a profound impact on how I interface with art in general. I remember playing Braid eighteen years ago when it was first released, dumbfounded at the beauty of the ending. More recently, playing Slay the Princess and Disco Elysium with my ex was probably one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life, bar none.

Agency, restriction, failure, and repetition can carry meaning no static medium can replicate. A poem describes grief; a game makes you embody a failure state. The throughline from those five-minute Flash experiments to Braid's time-rewind mechanic doubling as its central metaphor, to Slay the Princess asking you, again and again, to choose who you're going to be. Art games are often made on a shoestring budget and only need one good idea.

And because I've never really been interested in AAA games, I'm biased, but there are so many wonderful indie games on places like itch.io which are far less expensive and have much lower hardware requirements, and you're directly supporting game developers rather than these massive corporate companies that care about quarterly earnings far more than making enjoyable games. The itch.io ecosystem is a solo dev's three-hour narrative game, a couple's weekend game jam project, a game built in a week for a theme and never touched again.

I've found myself getting into the growing retro handheld scene in the past few years. While I have a beefy gaming PC that can run any number of video games, I find that for gaming, function follows form. I'd much rather play emulated titles on a handheld 3-inch Android screen with controls than the massive screen of my desktop or laptop.

Not to mention my gaming PC is upstairs in the summer heat while I spend the vast majority of my time in the basement, and I am also using it as my homelab server for folk.zone.

Anyways, the Retroid Pocket Nova was just released last month, and it looks amazing—a 4:3 aspect ratio screen that's also OLED 120Hz? You really couldn't ask for a better experience for retro emulation.

But, even at a fraction of the cost of home consoles by Sony or Microsoft, a new handheld like the Nova is still outside of my budget. All technology is expensive now, and the shipping costs to Canada certainly don't help.

But! A couple years ago I did splurge and get myself a Retroid Pocket 2S. It's a small, boxy thing—barely 200 grams—with a UNISOC Tiger T610 chip clocked up to 2GHz, paired with a Mali-G52 GPU that wasn't setting benchmarks back when it launched in 2023. The 3.5-inch IPS touchscreen runs at a 4:3 aspect ratio and a 640×480 resolution, which most people see as its biggest flaw. But really, retro systems were designed for that screen, weren't they? No letterboxing or stretching out. There's also hall-effect joysticks, dual USB-C and micro HDMI ports on the top, and it's running Android 11.

Even a device like this that's a few years old with a weaker chipset still has the capacity to emulate so many games. There's already quite a few I want to sink my teeth into.

To start, there's the time travel of Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story's clipped and liturgical dialogue, Xenogears' ambition, the found family of Persona 3 Portable. There's Skies of Arcadia, Silent Hill's fog, Streets of Rage 2's synth-drenched brawling, Gunstar Heroes throwing bullets like confetti, Crazy Taxi's radio-blasting, sun-bleached nonsense. Even Mother 3, which is still only fan-translated almost two decades later, might be the one I'm most looking forward to playing.

There are so many games to play. I'd certainly love to hear from my audience if you have any other suggestions! I would also love to hear about resources for homebrews and ROMhacks since I'm definitely out of practice finding stuff like that.

While it originally started as a term for guitarists, gear acquisition syndrome permeates all hobbies now. Everything is commodified, everything is FOMO'd. Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Especially if it's fun!