Yeah I don’t hate Valve fans at all. I have a Steam account myself with a decent library that I play on my laptop.

I had no clue whatsoever about the hacked 3DS ecosystem until my friend basically dragged me into it by buying the consoles (refurbished actually)! Once I started learning about the scene I really got impressed with what the small homebrew community accomplished. In addition to emulators and some homebrew games, there are also a number of utilities in the scene. You can run an FTP server on the hacked N3DS and just bulk copy over files via wifi rather than having to pull the microSD card and sneakernet it to your PC. There’s also a program called universal updater which is a package manager of sorts that makes it easy to download and install emulators and other apps quite easily.

Of course none of this is as smooth and convenient of an experience as installing Steam games would be on a Steam deck, though I’m sure if you’re into emulators you’ll have to use other tools to get those installed anyway.

My friend and I are currently playing through some classic NES RPGs which we’d previously overlooked. The N3DS has pretty good battery life, lasting about 10-12 hours on a full charge; far more battery life than I have time to spend gaming in a day anyway (due to my job). The standby time is good but not great, knocking off maybe about 10% battery per day while sleeping. Lastly, a big plus for me is that replacement batteries are available through iFixit. I bought 2 of them and the install process is very easy (just a couple of screws and you’re in).

My hope is that iFixit will continue to make replacement batteries available long term. That could potentially allow my N3DS to last decades into the future, barring premature capacitor failure or some unfortunate accident.

I think the N3DS really shines as a dedicated older emulator (NES/SNES/SEGA/GBC/GBA) machine and it may be very hard to beat if you’re like me and prefer those older games. For newer games, especially PC games of the last decades or PS2/GameCube/Wii/Switch emulators, the N3DS is just not an option. I am looking forward to playing the Majora’s Mask remaster (written specifically for the 3DS) however!