March 9th, 2007
 I've always been one to naturally gravitate to handheld games over a lot of the stuff on a home console. Even back before handhelds got a big graphical upgrade and were crappy bleep-bloops, I prefered the portable gaming option, hands down. Anyone who walks in my room and sees my video game shelf will see far more Gameboy boxes over Gamecube and PS2.
Console games, especially in the old days of no save files (lol, kids today would freak if they had to play a game with no saves), require you to sit down for a few hours and invest your precious time into playing them. The appeal with handheld gaming to me has always boiled down to two key factors. For one thing, the games were always quick and to the point. You could play for a few minutes or a few hours and most of the time you could save anywhere you needed to. I don't have A.D.D. or anything remotely like it, but I enjoy quick games. Especially as I get older and don't have the patience to sit through a long game when I have other things to do (like this site lol). But I'm sure other college-age students have a lot going on in their lives and find it much easier to game on a handheld in their downtime over something like World of Warcraft on PC or Final Fantasy XII on PS2.
The next thing is obvious -- it's portable. Whether it was brick sized or pocket sized, the fact remained you can take it with you without lugging a television set around. In fact, I think one my favorite past times is playing my Gameboy on the shitter lol. Hey, don't act like you don't take your DS or something into the bathroom with you! ... And I'm sure atleast one person reading this has dropped their system into the john lol... It's all good, we're all friends here.
This top 5 list will rundown the best handheld systems I've come across in my years of gaming. Agree? Disagree? Be sure to leave a comment at the end of page 2 -- I'd like to know your personal top 5 or general feedback. Okay, enough wit' tha jibba jabbah foo', it's time to countdown like yo' momma taught ya!
5. The Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) (2005 - )
 Alright, you probably know that I'm a Sony nut, but even with my near blind and overly biased tendicies, I didn't exactly roll out the red carpet for the Playstation Portable when it was released in 2005. Fanboys DREAMED of a handheld from Sony for years, and now we have one and it's.. well.. not that great.. To avoid turning this into a blistering diatribe, let me just say that there are plenty of things wrong with it, but there are a few things I happened to like about it when I first played one (which was when I was working at Best Buy during the holiday season in 2006 -- better later than never, right?).
For one thing, the graphics are very impressive and the screen is skeet inducing. The Gameboy Advance has a wide screen ratio, but what Sony put on the PSP is true portable widescreen gaming. Bravo.
While the PS2 quality graphics might ruffle some old skool vets like myself who think portable gaming should be simple across the board and leave the complex polygons at home, it's a good step in the right direction. Is it a tad bit overkill? I'd say so, but it's still pretty damn sweet. The PSP still feels like it's ahead of it's time (a trait the Playstation 3 shares), but in this case it's great; it truly feels like state of the art technology when you play one.
The lack of true exclusives is hurting the system though. Seriously, what's on here that makes me want to purchase one? Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection looked tempting, as well as the GTA games Rockstar is putting on there, but 2 or 3 games doesn't justify a purchase of a $250 machine by any means. Companies are just porting over stuff from PS2 and the PSX era (more so in Japan than in the States) instead of focusing on original content. Software makes the hardware, Sony, not the other way around. They're lucky they have crazy marketing (like the whole "White Is Coming" fiasco in Europe), or else this woulda been a flop.
In the long run, the PSP will be a success, but who'll really care? It's good hardware getting screwed over because there's nothing to play except rehashes. As soon as they get some shit worth playing and the price drops, I'll buy one. The UMD movie format is an entirely different rant on it's own, lol, so I'll just move on.
4. The Nintendo Gameboy (Original 8-bit, all versions) (1989 - 2001)
From the brick styled "fatboy," the Pocket, to the Color, the Gameboy was just one system that just kept on ticking no matter what happened (seriously, the thing was a tank!) or what rival companies threw at it. The damned thing was around since 1989.. before some of you viewing the page were even BORN. It definitely has that O.G. status and I'm sure EVERYONE reading this has owned a variation of it. It definitely has a soft spot in my generation's hearts since we literally grew up with it.
 The first game on it, Tetris, is still one of the best games ever made for any handheld nearly 17 years later (even though Tetris DS might be good, the original is always the best). This is why I say simplicity is good. In fact, the Gameboy had a ton of great games in it's near 12-year lifetime like the Super Mario Land series, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Pokémon, and basically anything Nintendo put out on the system was bank.
Fun games are the reason why no other handheld that came along could ever topple it -- even if they had more powerful hardware. The Game Gear, Game.com, Lynx, and Neo Geo Pocket all failed to take down the Big N. Plus, every new version improved it significantly. I never had the "fatboy," but I did get around to getting a Pocket in 1998 and a Color in 1999. I loved them dearly lol.
The Gameboy pretty much made the entire market for portable gaming, so for that reason alone I have to include it on this list. If it wasn't for this, we'd still be playing those shitty Tiger LCD games... you know, the ones where the background never changes? LOL don't front like you don't have two or three of those shits.
3. SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color (1997 - 2000)
 In 1997 SNK, best known for it's King of Fighters series in the arcades and home consoles, decided to release a monochrome, 16-bit handheld called the Neo Geo Pocket. It was only out in Japan for awhile, but it was finally brought over to the US near the end of the millennium. When we got it, it was in Color to compete with the then white-hot Gameboy Color. The NGPC was a really, really great machine that just went under rated in the mainstream. It was a hell of a lot more powerful than the GBC, but the battery life wasn't laughable like the Game Gear nor was it the size of a brick lol. It was a legit competitor to the Gameboy and the first time there was a true alternative to Nintendo's monoloply since the Game Gear. It was indeed a great time... even if the games set you back $39.99 a pop (this was the late 90's mind you.. When PSX games still cost that much).
Most of the games on the system were fighters, so SNK didn't bother putting a D-Pad on it. Instead, they opted to include a joystick and it was a genius decision. It made doing Zangief's spinning pile driver in "SNK vs Capcom: Match of The Milliennium" (MoTM) a delight instead of a blister-inducing nightmare. Everyone who played my system during my 8th and 9th grade years fell in love with the joystick because after long play sessions, your thumb would still be in tip-top shape. You can't get that greatness these days, esp. with the DS and PSP D-Pads being about as forgiving as getting the fat-end of a baseball bat stuck up your ass.
 The joystick made a "clicking" noise very similar to a mouse click everytime you moved it, which made my sessions of playing it during class in middle school hard to cover up lol. And speaking of SNK vs Capcom, that is still probably the best portable 2D fighter ever made -- even if my boy Sagat (or as my friend Stephen calls him "Fagat" lol) wasn't on the roster. I don't give a shit if Street Fighter Alpha 3 is on the PSP, I doubt it can touch the greatness of MotM (Sadly, I don't own this anymore, or the system... D'oh!).
The NGPC had other games though, like "Sonic The Hedgehog," "Pac-Man," and "SNK vs. Capcom: Cardfighter's Clash"... the game list was just skewed towards fighting games because a) that's their specialty, just like you think of RPGs when somebody mentions Square-Enix and b) SNK didn't have that much 3rd party support aside from Sega and Namco. The amount of fighting games was starting to get a wee bit ridiculous, esp. considering that MoTM was pretty much the end-all, be-all of portable fighters.
SNK stopped support on it in 2000, which was a shame. They still make games for the current handhelds (a sequel to Cardfighter's Clash is coming to the DS soon, I suggest picking it up), so it's not that big of a loss. If you missed out on playing one of these babies, I really do suggest finding an emulator ASAP. I haven't check up on emulation of the NGPC since 2000 when I was working on an update for the site back then, but it was fairly decent at the time (aside from having no sound), so I expect it to be nearly spot-on by now. Try Zophar.net. As far as ROMs are concerned, you're really on your own lol.
The countdown continues on the next page with numbers 2 and 1, along with the handhelds that didn't quite make the cut lol...
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