#idk what to tzg this as its one of my casual 3am rant

[sybeez]

I believe one of the reasons so many kids under 12 only watch loud tiktoks on their phones is because of the death of the DS, and handheld gaming in general. (Also the disappearance of wired headphones but I wanna focus on the DS)

Like sure if you wanna play handheld now there's still the Switch and maybe the steam deck but 1/ both are pricier and 2/ none of them are easy to fit in a pocket like a ds or gameboy was. Even the Switch requires internet to play SINGLE PLAYER GAMES THAT YOU DOWNLOADED if you're not at home. And most games on those are meant to be played on a tv or computer screen to spend hours at a time on, not play for 10-15mins at a time while in the bus.

But back in the DS/3DS era?? It was MEANT to be a casual handheld console to take everywhere with you. They were small and maybe the size of a phone today, even the XL models at least fit in a pocket (big pockets ig); the Switch you need at least a bag with you to carry. And the game library was PACKED. Just pokemon alone had tons of genres on that console to choose from. Also I remember the dsi game sharing thing we're if you didn't have a game you could still play like, Mario kart with someone else as long as they had the game n play as a maskass. Plus, street pass?? The 3ds was so widespread you could find at least one other person with one on your commute every day.

,,, I might have lost my train of thought in DS nostalgia.

Back to the point. If a kid wants entertainment out of home now, they only have their phone to look at. Sure some mobile games are decent nowadays but there's a difference between one time purchase on sale at a flea market you can waste hundreds of hours into with interesting cc concepts, and choosing between predatory gacha game that's supposed to eat all your money or candy-crush clone number 3967 with in-app purchases and hundreds of adds per minutes. But at least both are free right?

The morale of this post if we should give kids 3DSs again.