Even with the looming specter of rising prices, there’s never been a better time for portable gaming. The Steam Deck has ushered in a new era of handheld PCs, the Analogue Pocket and other Game Boy-style remakes are making retro games more approachable than ever, the Playdate has led to an alternate universe of weirdo portable titles, and Nintendo continues to chug along with the latest iteration of the Switch. If you want to play games on the go, you’re spoiled for choice. But if you’re planning on doing some traveling and want to bring games along with you, I’d actually recommend none of those devices. There’s a much better, and older, option: the humble Nintendo DS.
Before you scoff, bear with me for a moment. From a hardware standpoint, the DS line is ideal for travel. It’s small enough to be pocketable, the clamshell design keeps the screens protected if you toss it in a bag, the battery life is good enough for a long flight, and you can play basically every game without the need for Wi-Fi, which is never a given when you’re traveling. If you need to suddenly stop playing for any reason, you just close it up like a book and the system goes to sleep immediately. In comparison, the Switch 2 is large and heavy, and the battery usually only lasts a few hours, depending on how demanding the game is. That’s fine for lounging on the couch at home. It’s less than ideal if you’re flying from Toronto to Tokyo. The DS and its successors don’t have those same problems.
When it comes to games, there are few platforms with a bigger, more diverse lineup than the DS (released in 2004) and 3DS (released in 2011 and backward compatible with the original). So even if you’ve owned one for years, there’s likely a large number of great games you missed out on. That includes a lot more than the expected Nintendo franchises. I’ve been toting a slate gray 3DS XL around with me when I travel and have been making my way through three games simultaneously, depending on how much time I have to play at any given moment. When I settle in for a long spell, I jump into the charming dungeon crawler Fantasy Life from Level-5; when I want to dig into a story, I’m in the midst of a replay of the original Ace Attorney trilogy; and when I only have a few minutes I solve a Picross 3D puzzle or two.
Obviously there’s nothing new coming out for the DS or 3DS anymore, which is the one main drawback. If you want to buy some new (to you) games, it means going cart digging, which can be a fun and rewarding experience, but isn’t as quick and easy as, say, picking up a copy of Breath of the Wild. There’s also an issue with digital games. Now that the eShop is closed, you can’t buy anything digitally, though you can still redownload games you’ve previously purchased. That’s great if you had the foresight to load up your device with a library of smaller digital games, but it also means that if you didn’t, there’s no way to access titles like the BoxBoy series of puzzlers or Dr. Mario: Miracle Cure, which are now lost to the digital ether.
But with a couple of fresh games, the DS becomes a device that requires little work or forethought to take along with you on a trip. And because Nintendo iterated on the hardware for years, there are a few different options to choose from. The original DS and the smaller Lite version have the added bonus of also having a Game Boy Advance cartridge slot, opening up the amount of games you can play even more. Going that route does mean you can’t play games built for the 3DS, so which version you choose really depends on what games you have or plan to play. For me, the 3DS XL has been the ideal option; I can play my giant library of DS and 3DS titles, and I can still access all of the digital games I bought right before the eShop closed. (Super Metroid replay, here I come.)
It may be an unexpected option, but as someone who is fully immersed in portable gaming — sometimes I even whip out the Vita — I’m always surprised at how often I go back to the 3DS. It’s just so comfortable and accessible as a piece of hardware, with an incredible lineup of games to choose from, that I still haven’t exhausted what it has to offer. And it seems like I’m not the only one. Somehow, in the year 2026, I still get StreetPass notifications from other like-minded nerds who just can’t put away their Castlevania machine.
