Not out of any particular nostalgia for the device itself, nor because I’ve seen anyone else with one. I just had a sudden hankering to play a Ridge Racer, and it turned out my PS3 is stuck in some kind of update loop.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well it’s held up. And by that, I mean this specific unit: over 20 years old, left in the back of a drawer for at least the last 10, but seemingly as good as new. The screen is obviously a bit dim by modern standards, but the battery still holds a charge for hours. If I treated a smartphone like that, I’d be afraid of it swelling to the size of a football and setting fire to the building.
By contrast, the DS Lite I found in the same drawer no longer recognises anything in either cartridge slot and the screens have developed a brownish gradient running top to bottom, although the clock had only drifted by ~40 minutes.
For me, that era of portable gaming coincided with a lot of travel for work, holidays, gigs and music festivals. I’ve probably spent more time playing games on those two consoles than I have on every mobile device released before or since put together.
It’ll probably end up back in the drawer sooner rather than later, but I had a fun Saturday evening working my way through a shoebox of UMDs, checking out save files mostly timestamped 2006-2008. And maybe I’ll finish another run through Jeanne d’Arc first.