(Image credit: Future)This month I’ve been: Inducting my daughter into a life of crime in Magical Princess, and constructing cozily cluttered dioramas in Shanty Town—two games I’m confident would also be fantastic on a handheld.The idea of taking serious hardware horsepower on the go was always the dream of my misspent, console-gaming youth. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved how older handheld systems made a calling card out of their limitations (and in the case of Nintendo, offered a hardware gimmick or gaming experience you couldn’t find anywhere else). The fact that now you can play many of the same games on a portable device that you can also play in your gamer den would’ve blown my younger self’s mind. Unfortunately, the dream-come-true of handheld gaming PCs feels like it is coming to an end.Our Andy updates our handheld gaming PC deals each week and recently shared a shocking revelation: ‘Somehow, the $1,000 Asus ROG Ally Xbox X is the best value gaming handheld I can think of right now.’ If you’ve got the cash then, sure, the Asus ROG Ally Xbox X with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of onboard SSD storage makes sense for the asking price. But where does that leave you if you’re on a much tighter budget?The memory supply crisis has raised the pricing floor of all handhelds. Case in point, the device that we still rate as the best budget handheld gaming PC is the…
