Fatherhood and the Handheld Gaming System

Let me start off with one quick fact: I have been on the "physical hardware over emulation" train since 2020, to the point where it has for sure been annoying my friends and wife. And now, at the start of 2026, that hasn't really changed... much.

November 2025, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world after almost 30 hours in labor. Thankfully, we had planned ahead and brought our Switches with us to keep ourselves sane during the first few hours. She played Hades II, I played Final Fantasy Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles. And for what it was, it helped a lot.

Flash forward to when we got home, and after the first 2 weeks we were done playing the Switches, and were thinking to ourselves "man I wish I could play Fallout New Vegas on my desktop" and "I wish I could do a dungeon in Diablo 4", but we had never put any thought into anything like a Steam Deck or device to to Steam Link play. Ah well.

Eventually, we remembered I had an Analogue Pocket, purchased on impulse in 2025, so we hooked the dock up and set out playing old games to pass a few spare minutes baby between feeds and naps. My wife had never really experienced the Gen1 or Gen2 Pokemon games first hand, so I dug out my cartridges and we let the good times flow.

I absolutely LOVE the Analogue Pocket, maybe more than I ever loved my original Gameboy Color, and that came in Atomic Purple which is hands down the best console coloring ever and I will not hear any arguments against it. The fact that it can play all the GBC and GBA cartridges I've saved over the years using ORIGINAL HARDWARE vs dumping the rom and emulating is just... just so damn good. And of course you can also play roms on it, because of course, but if you're like me and have been spending the last year dumping all of your physical cartridge and disk-based games for preservation, it's actually pretty handy.

The Pocket only plays the Gameboy family of games natively, with adapters expanding that support to things like GameGear, Neo Geo Pocket, and of course the Atari Lynx. FPGA Cores expand that out to include the SNES, Genesis, NES, and a few arcade games as well, so you're not really limited on options. But for me, the main goal was playing my games with the ability to back up my saves, and also not burn my aged (34yr old) eyes with the strain of original Gameboy screens. That shit was hard to look at for long periods.

But of course... that urge to play our PC games came back. Enter the Retroid Pocket Flip 2.

Remember how earlier on in this post I said "I have been on the "physical hardware over emulation" train since 2020, to the point where it has for sure been annoying my friends and wife"? Sooooooooooooo...

This thing is just so dang fun. In essence, it's an emulation machine built on Android software. All the literature around this things mentions having to source the game roms yourself, for legal reasons obviously, but as I mentioned earlier I had a bit of a stockpile going. It can even run Steam Link, which lets you stream a game from your computer to the device over your WiFi connection.

From testing on, you guessed it... Diablo 4, this works well enough most of the time. We use Eero as our network (not by choice) with 1 gig up and down, but because of how Eero works the device is attached to one node, most likely in my studio/office, so when I move to another room, it still sits on the original node and doesn't move to a closer one, which leads to a LOT of stuttering and disconnections. But for non-streamed games, like playing Tales of the Abyss on the PS2 emulator, it works surprisingly well!

It's got a ton of specs which I didn't take time to really look at (shout out to videos by Retro Game Corps), but the screen is nice for its size, the build feels solid enough, and the sticks are tight, but not overly tight if that makes sense. Also Amazon lost the package for a week and refunded me what I paid, only for my neighbor to deliver it to me so for $0, it's pretty fantastic.

And then my wife stole it from me after I took the time to set up a Steam Link for her in the living room because, and I quote, "I can play this when nap trapped!" Who would I be to deny that.

Anyway this is the Lenovo Legion Go S.

Around the holidays, I started looking into a larger option to play games on, preferably without Steam Link if I could help it so I could move around without major issue. My good buddy and now fellow father Ben, aka Kamiblade, had been raving about his Lenovo Legion for a while now, so I did some digging and decided that it was the best bang for the buck, AND I could play Diablo on it!

I play a lot of Diablo if you couldn't tell.

Of course, I loaded it up with the same emulation tools as the Flip 2, because options, but primarily this is a Steam game system and that's all I want it to really be. Something that I can bring to the couch and play co-op Cult of Lamb with my wife, or run a few nightmare dungeons in Diablo, or even play a round of Crab Champion with the JCAB boys, even though I absolutely despise playing that game on a controller.

One thing that these three devices share in common, besides emulation, is that they have video output options to play on a monitor or tv, which is okay for me I guess. I picked up the Pocket Dock at the same time as the Analogue Pocket, and that thing is super nice; small footprint, ports on the back, and simple to set the Pocket into and leave it alone.

But for the Flip 2 and Legion Go, I haven't had a chance to really kick the tires and see what they can do. I have a hub coming that I can test the Legion Go on, but what will be interesting is if the Flip 2 can use that same hub because that would mean that anyone can play anything on any console at any time on any tv in our house. And since we have the baby, short busts of games feel like they would fit right in with that mindset.

Fatherhood has been a trip so far, and we're just at the cusp of TWO MONTHS! He's smiling, trying to laugh, and somehow has become a pro at lifting his head during that time, but I know we have a long way to go still. But with options like the Flip 2 or the Analogue Pocket available, as well as whatever the next impulse pickup is, I know my wife and I will be able to keep our sanity!