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.

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.

Computer

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

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.

My old PSP3000 is one of my favorite pieces. It hasn’t seen any action in 5+ years now, but it will probably get some around september.

Mandatory jab at the switch. Not awful but cmon, the controls suck

cries in 3 left joycons with drift

Another of my least fave is my laptop’s monitor. It’s an ASUS ROG whose screen sucks major balls. If it ever gets over 40ºC, it starts showing some “scanlines” or something like that, with horizontal lines that don’t refresh correctly or something, kinda hard to describe. In any case, if I ever game straight on it without anything blowing cool air on the screen, games will become unplayable because it’ll reach a point where I literally can’t see shit, because the screen won’t be refreshing correctly, several lines will be “stuck” for 1 second or more. The keyboard is also a piece of shit.

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.

Favorite: Steam Deck, it’s my favorite piece of gaming hardware I’ve ever owned. The controls are fantastic, it’s now frustrating to use other controllers that don’t have back paddles, gyro, or track pads.

Least favorite: cheap off-brand controllers, with bad tactile buttons, sticking buttons, analog sticks that drift, analog sticks that only register 8 directions, etc.

Also, Wii U. I have some mixed feelings on it because I have some good memories with the system, but the hardware never paid off. Their were almost no games that made use of the gamepad screen in a way that wasn’t just a gimmick, generally the only real advantages of it were being able to play on a handheld screen while the TV was being used (a feat that the switch and steam deck so far better) and being able to have split screen multiplayer where the players can’t see each other’s screen (limited because you only have 1 game pad, and the deck struggles to do two different rendered screens for many games, with games like Hyrule warriors having to cut the enemies in half when doing split screen).

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

Virtual boy fits in both best and worst 👍

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!

• 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

• 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

Favorite: Nintendo 3DS XL. I never would have thought a resistive touchscreen would last that long. What an absolute beating that thing took.

Dogshit: Microsoft Sidewinder Game Pad Pro (1999 edition). Motherfucker didn’t know up from left.

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.

I only have one, a 16 inch, 120hz, 16GB RAM, 1660 Ti laptop, so it’s got to be that. I do like it, though.