Let me know what you think!

Hah!

That’s fair. In my defence, an article like this takes me a good while to put together. I’ll start with the idea, jot down notes, get in touch with the developer and interview them at their convenience, then go through their answers and work out how to build that material into a story that still feels like their experience, using the quotes I like most to help bring it to life.

All the way through that process I’m drafting, redrafting and leaving myself little notes in the article. I tend to get ideas down quickly and tidy them up later; that’s just how I work. Most of the time it all gets cleaned up, but occasionally one of those awkward little notes-to-self survives the edit and sneaks into the finished piece.

That’s what happened here.

I will say, though, you could probably have made the point a little more kindly. I’m not pretending to be some flawless professional journalist. This is a hobby for me, and I do it because I genuinely love gaming, especially handheld gaming. I put a lot of time into these pieces because I care about the people and projects I’m writing about, even if the odd rough edge from my process slips through.

Even before I got to this part, I was thinking “if I want to play a GBA SP, I’ll just play one.”

That’s fair! I collect the originals too, although I’m more partial to the non-SP models, especially once they’ve been modded. But what I miss on the real hardware is save states, fast-forward, upscaling, and all the other modern conveniences you quickly get spoiled by. For roughly the price of one EverDrive (lovely things though they are) I can buy a very solid modern interpretation, throw every game I actually want on it, and have them loading instantly. Nostalgia is great; nostalgia with quality-of-life features is even better.

As for the A.I. side, also fair. I was fully expecting the pitchforks to come out over that bit. But after interviewing somewhere around 70 developers in the handheld scene, I’ve seen plenty of people who have been coding for decades use A.I. as exactly that: a tool. Sometimes it gives them breathing room, sometimes it gets them through the boring parts, sometimes it lets them spend more time on the bits they actually care about. I completely understand why the subject is sore, but gaming in 2026 pretending developers aren’t already using these tools feels a little like angrily shouting at the tide for coming in.