How Handheld Consoles Made Traveling My Best Time for Gaming

I’ve been an avid gamer all my life, once dedicating entire days to the virtual world. As a busy adult, I don’t get such opportunities often. There’s always something to do. And yet, it turns out that traveling is actually the prime time to game, and it could be for you as well.

There’s Usually Nothing Better to Do

Traveling has two extremes. There are periods of time that are really busy, and periods of time when you’ve got nothing to do but wait for the trip to be over. My experience in airports reflects this pretty well: getting through security, securing your bags, and reaching your gate all require your focus. But once you’re waiting for departure, or your flight gets delayed, or you’re on the flight itself, you tend to do nothing except wait.

Sure, maybe there’s an important call you have to make or some email to send, but surely you’ll have a lot of downtime somewhere in all of this. On the flight itself, you could watch a movie on a tiny screen, or you could play a game, provided you brought the right gear. A handheld console like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally are fantastic for long flights because they’ve got a lot of battery and can help you continue your PC game saves even when you’re away from your PC.

In a busy adult life where you could often be doing something “useful” with your time, traveling is one of the few instances where I truly have nothing better to do besides gaming.

Game at Every Step of the Journey

I probably do more gaming on my Steam Deck these games than I do on my Xbox Series X or my perfectly capable gaming laptop. Not because I don’t enjoy those machines (the Series X isn’t dead yet), but because they just aren’t as readily available as my Steam Deck, which can be brought almost anywhere with ease. Handheld consoles are ready and raring to go at a moment’s notice, with little need for an ideal gaming environment or accessories.

Waiting at a bus stop, hitching a ride in a friend’s car, taking a flight, and even riding on a boat are all places I’ve been able to whip out my Steam Deck and whittle away the time. Even a laptop, which is pretty portable itself, is still less convenient than a handheld console. It takes longer to start up a game, it’s often noisier, and there might not be a solid surface to place it on: you really don’t have to worry about any of this with handheld gaming.

I’ve got a big backlog of games I want to finish, and while I sometimes only get small windows of time to play games while traveling, the fact is, my Steam Deck is portable and accessible enough that I can fully utilize every single one of those small windows with almost no setup or delay. Moreover, a handheld console is much less weight in my bag wherever I’m traveling, and it can usually be charged with regular phone chargers if need be.

Handheld Consoles Are Better for Multitasking and Easier to Play

Even when I have my laptop with me, I often play games on the Steam Deck instead. It’s not because the Steam Deck is a better machine by any means. But it’s much easier to multitask with it. When I’m working on my laptop, I can’t really afford to be hopping back and forth between a game window and everything else. It’s difficult, annoying, and much harsher on my productivity.

Whether I’m traveling or not, I’ve often got a handheld console up and running right next to my laptop, because it’s just much, much easier to both play a game and stay relatively focused on a task at hand. Sure, it really depends on whether the game is the type that requires your constant attention, but regardless, I see this as a major strength of handheld gaming consoles.

This is to say nothing about the fact that they’re just more convenient when you’re on the move. Yeah, I could bring my gaming laptop on a trip. But then I have to bring the bigger charger, the mouse, and a bigger case, and I’ll always need something to put it down on to play seriously. Sometimes I have a limited amount of space in my travel bag, and it’s much easier to fit a Steam Deck and its accessories in it than my laptop and everything it needs.

Plus, the Steam Deck itself can be used as a PC. So it’s not like you need both your laptop and a handheld gaming computer on any particular trip.

No Internet Drives Me to Play Single-Player Games

These days, there are many ways you can still connect your devices to the internet even while traveling. Even on planes, where you used to have to completely disconnect, you might be able to connect to the internet. That said, the internet connection you can manage while in transit from place to place is usually not good enough to play multiplayer games on, unless you’re fine with poor latency.

The thing is, I actually perceive this as a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love online games. But I also love single-player games. Yet, I often find myself at the end of a long day of work turning to online games because a single match or two is easier to hop into and hop off of than tuning into an RPG for an hour. So despite my huge backlog of single-player games to play, I don’t often have a chance to put serious hours into finishing them.

Being forcibly disconnected from any internet good enough to support a match of War Thunder or Helldivers 2 makes it so that backlog of single-player games is kind of my only choice. Yes, it’s weird to acknowledge that I almost have to be forced to play these games that I supposedly enjoy, but I think a lot of gamers get where I’m coming from. It’s just easier to sink hours into a single-player game while traveling than it is at home, in my opinion.

Traveling is a Great Time to Focus on Retro Gaming

Do you have games from your childhood that you constantly tell yourself you want to play again, but you never do? You’d love to go back and play a GameBoy or PlayStation 2 title, but when you’re at home, you’ve got access to your powerful gaming machine and all of these new games… it can be hard to convince yourself to go back and play something old, even if you’re fond of it, when you could be playing something new with your home hardware.

Handheld consoles are not only a perfect traveling companion, but they’re also a fantastic candidate for retro gaming. Because of this, I’ve knocked back way more replays of beloved classics while traveling than I have at home. For starters, the Steam Deck is really easy to turn into an emulation machine, with EmuDeck making the whole process extremely simple for the majority of emulators.

Secondly, some games just feel a lot better to play on a handheld console than they do a regular PC. Pretty much any game that was originally meant for a handheld like the GameBoy, DS, or PSP feels much more at home on a console like the Steam Deck than it does on my gaming laptop. Because the games feel more comfortable to play on my Steam Deck, they’re even more likely to get that long-awaited replay any time the Deck is my primarily available console.

Handheld Limitations Forcibly Expand my Gaming Library

Not every game is made for the road. As much as I’d love it, Oblivion Remastered is not going to look its best on my Steam Deck, which means I probably won’t play it while I’m traveling. There are lots of games like this, titles that are too graphically demanding or too power-hungry to be good choices for handheld gaming, especially during a trip. But I think this too is a secret, almost ‘forced’ benefit of playing on handheld consoles while traveling.

There are a lot of games out there designed specifically for handhelds or at least heavily favoring them. Games you probably wouldn’t ever notice or play if you only stuck to your home consoles and your gaming PC. Heck, forget the Steam Deck, just think of the Nintendo Switch: any game exclusive to the Switch is a game built for a handheld console, and much more likely to be played when that handheld is your only option.

But even ignoring Switch exclusives, having to hunt for games that are ideal for travel—games that play well on my Steam Deck and won’t drain its battery too quickly—have forced me to look past all the big flashy games that take up the most ad space in marketing and unearth some real hidden gems, games I would likely never have found or considered playing if I was just using my bigger, badder gaming platforms.

This ties back into retro gaming as well: all of those old games designed for much older hardware don’t take much battery power from something like the Steam Deck. So hunting for games to play while traveling has also gotten me to look at classic gems from the past that I never had access to back in the day. There have been some incredible games from both the past and present that I’ve only had the chance to enjoy because handheld gaming forced me to look deeper into what was out there.

I know that’s not for everyone. Some people are really content to stick to the small handful of games or genres they like. But personally, I believe that gamers should diversify their experience from time to time, lest they miss out on some truly amazing hidden gems. Besides, games that are ideal for handhelds are often cheaper than usual too!

These days, I spend more time gaming on my handheld consoles than I do on my gaming laptop or Xbox, and it’s mostly thanks to how fantastic they are for traveling. While that’s not for everyone, if you’d like to squeeze more game time into your business trips, vacations, or even just your commute to work, you may want to consider getting a good handheld gaming console for yourself.