The only console I own which hasn’t been made redundant with time (sorry, Playstation 1) is the Game Boy Advance¹. This is partially due to my frustration with paying more than $30 for a video game, my own knowledge of gaming economics be damned², and partially due to my abiding love of the sprite, but, most realistically, for the portable game system’s ability to be played anywhere, at any time, and not just when I am, personally, at home.

Oh who is a crafty dude for putting those footnote-indicators above the cut. Is it me because it is. Now you have to read on to know what my metacommentary is. Oh I am the smartest dude.

I’m not a very good gamer; sitting down with a game for more than a few minutes, unless it’s in the company of friends, racks me with guilt. The feeling that surely there’s something more important to do nearly assumes its own corporeality, flicking me in the back of the neck while I try to chain materia or shoot a cop or whatever. This wasn’t true before I was responsible for my own rent, and maybe it’ll go away once I learn how to balance a checkbook, but in the delicate interim, as much as I’d love to flounce through Weapon Master mode yet again, I cannot do so in good faith. (Sorry, Kilik.)

Hence the advantage of the portable unit: In theory, the ability to take gaming with me allows me to take advantage of the downtime forced upon me by the inefficiency of the real world. “Like stop signs?” Not like stop signs — like bank queues, or the crosstown bus, or my lunch break at work. I once spent half an hour in December waiting outside a Japanese restaurant for a blind date to show up; if it weren’t for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, my resolve might have well shattered, the date unconsummated. Having a tiny portal into escapism is useful; sales of the iPod should be proof of that, if nothing else.

Given this, here’s what I’d like to see in portables, in the near future, against all odds: Support for near-microscopic amounts of playtime. After all, if a console’s strength is that it can be transported and concealed, to be removed from the coat pocket at will, why place any boundary between me and the forty seconds of platformer I want to squeeze in at the DMV? Why you gotta have these rules?

The technology to save states, or suspend states, is one of the greatest allures of emulating games; you can still buy Battletoads, thanks to used bins, but only through the magic of emulation can you ever beat it. A save state is, as far as I can glean from all this blah-blah wizard-talk crap I had to wade through to write all this, the result of the contents of a console’s ROM being dumped onto a physical drive and saved for later. When you want to pick up where you left off, just stuff all those variables back into the game, and poof! You’re back on level three of Deadly Towers! Just…where you, uh, wanted to. Um. Be.

This process was well-nigh impossible in early console days, but now that we’re in the age of fingernail-sized hard drives, why don’t we just get some emulation support already? Tell you what. Here’s a pitch for a Nintendo DS add-on that I’d buy in a second, is probably feasible, and lets me move on with the article. Watch me flex: A GBA cartridge that consists entirely of writable storage, much like the area on an RPG cartridge that stores saved-game data. You’ve got your DS game, right? And you’re playing it, like a little baby, nervous and scared of the unfamiliar world around you. A snap — what’s that noise! Quick, you’d better save your game so you can pick up where you left off after the werewolf mauls you!³ Just like in the fast-load cartridges of the Commodore 64 days, you’ve got your state-save gamepak in the GBA slot, and you poke a button on its top. Bingo — the contents of the DS game’s ROM are totally dumped onto it, and written to. The button next to it loads them. Now you can throw your DS behind you to stave off the slavering hound’s advance, and run! Run!

Anyway, what’s the point of forcing the user to view a save file as an arbitrary reward for completing in-game tasks in the first place? It’s not like I’m not excited about winning. Remember how games like Doom let you save whenever the hell you wanted, and a bunch of people were just total assholes about how that cheapened the gameplay experience by negating the concept of danger inherent in making you work to save? Remember how Doom then sold six billion copies, and how every PC game ever made afterwards did the same thing, except for maybe Powerslave, which you don’t remember. I know that games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance already thought this one through, with their pagefile mid-battle quicksaves, but fuck a menu. Damn people, just keybind L+R+Select to Quicksave and get over yourselves. Hell, just keybind Select to it already; none of you even use it.

Culture is heading this way anyhow. Wario Ware is the first great in-house example of it; television has progressed to the point where MTV has a show that gives you 30 seconds of biographical “information” of a popular artist in 60 jump-cuts’ (and 20 shitty Aftereffects filters’) worth of film stock. Music — well, music is a tricky subject for me to talk about, because I know just enough to feel like an asshole making generalizations about it (this is why I do not write critically about it! I’m the opposite of NPR!), but rest assured there’s a lot out there for people who can’t sit still. Google “grindcore” sometime, hopefully sometime when you’re cool with looking at album covers of eviscerated horse corpses. I digress — all I’m saying is, hello developers, we are used to wildly disparate sensory impulses tweaking off of our synapses. They had to make medication to help my generation slow down a little, and then we went and make coke cool again.⁴ The least you could do to keep up is let us advertise your product for free by enabling us to take your junk out in public for a few seconds at a time. Or, uh. You know what I mean. Someone else rewrite that sentence so it doesn’t sound like my hand is full of somebody’s pipe.

¹ Which is why most of my articles for this site will concentrate on obscure or untranslated titles, at least until I once again move in with someone a little quicker on the uptake. Joystiq this ain’t.

⁴ Note to children: Cocaine is not cool. Winners don’t use drugs. Also, fuck the WTO.