I think we could unfortunately be seeing the end of quirky consoles. The move seems to be towards standardizing everything so instead of building 5 games for 5 consoles, you build 1 game that's 5 times as good and can just hit build for each different platform.
The DS era was super fun and experimental, but most of the games were simplistic or they were first party. I think that market has largely been eaten up by mobile phones these days as well.
> largely been eaten up by mobile phones these days
In the beginning of the pandemic, when I was stuck alone at home with not much to do, I picked up a couple original DS Lite consoles for cheap and a "New Nintendo 3DS XL" (confusing name for a console :p) for a good price as well. My intention was originally to try to make homebrew for the consoles. In the end I didn't get around to the homebrew stuff but I did play quite a few different games. Thanks in part due to the fact that in a nearby city someone had listed a bunch of DS and a few 3DS cartridges that they were straight up giving away. So with those along with the ones that I got with the consoles, I had like 15 to 20 different games for the consoles or thereabouts.
The majority of the play time for me was with the New 3DS XL, as it fit my hands and vision better than the small DS consoles.
There were several games that I enjoyed quite a lot.
And to me, I still think mobile phones don't quite live up to it for a few reasons.
I mean, yeah playing GTA III on the iPhone 14 Pro is a nice experience. I've completed GTA III start to finish both on iPhone 14 Pro, as well as on previous iPhone models in the past.
But in general I don't like playing games with touch screen controls as much as playing with physical buttons. And even though there exists bluetooth controllers you can pair with an iPhone, I had a terrible unusable experience with a tried that.
There are some other mobile games that are super nice, like for example Monument Valley.
But there is also a lot of ad-ridden garbage on mobile.
So my preference would for the most part still be to play more games on the New 3DS XL, rather than to play more games on mobile.
But ideally I want to buy something like one of these, and play emulated games:
I use Microsoft's app to stream my Xbox Series S to an iPad Air 5. I use the OEM Series S controller paired to the iPad.
Connected to my headless Xbox Series S are only the CAT6 and AC cables.
I think my mesh network is only Wifi 5, too. But it's also playable over 5G when I'm out, and that says a lot because my home connection is run-of-the-mill rural DOCSIS cable internet.
Sorry that you had a bad experience. Also I am a huge fan of dedicated appliances for particular classes of applications if you could not tell.
Sure, the same iPad Air 5 I'm using has the fancy M1 that can supposedly play games but...where are the games?
Like you said, they're not porting the games to iOS because touchscreen. Otoh, they could (and do!) require you need a controller, but then Apple would have to admit you need a third party peripheral -- which might actually zombify Steve Jobs from his slumber.
But they'll happily push a GTA port with the interface grossly adapted to the touch screen.
So it's a marketing thing: Apple is not going to be 'seen with' Microsoft, but they'll let Microsoft publish an official streaming client in their store without much fanfare. That app requires a (presumably Xbox-Microsoft-propriety-licensed) controller paired. Then I get to play top-tier games on my iPad, while Apple pretends I wouldn't ever want to do this anyway unless it was via the touch screen. Everybody wins!
One more thought: consider the battery fuel trade-off between A) running locally B) streaming ... Consider that ChromeOS can do that Xbox stream thing too, and the battery life is about 10 hours on the cheapest book (terrible 720p screen) I could buy...all despite running as an 'android emulated app' (whatever that actually means in the streaming clients particular context, they could have shipped intel native binaries anyway.) I get maybe 5-8 hours on the iPad (which has a nice screen remember), but it's not 10 hours.
...
Anyway, my point in sharing all of this, was to illustrate why I believe advanced mobile consoles like the 3DS are going away, despite the (still accelerating) growth of mobile processing power: the future is cloud gaming, so your hand held device just needs to be an acceptable thin-client which optimizes on the appropriate things (battery life, screen quality, can I drop it on asphalt, does it easily pair controllers....)
The DS era was super fun and experimental, but most of the games were simplistic or they were first party. I think that market has largely been eaten up by mobile phones these days as well.