[Blaugust Day 15]

Remember when I was complaining about the Vita yesterday, and how I was never play though old games again anyway? I was about to add on a throwaway line to the end of the post about how the first company to make a portal Steam machine would make a lot of cash.

Well, turns out there’s one scheduled for a late 2016 release:

Smach, the company touting the portable Steam OS device, says the handheld will ship out during the fourth quarter of 2016. That $299 price (€299 in Europe) is apparently the device’s pre-sale price only. We’ve reached out to the company for more details on pricing.

The Smach Zero — the Steamboy project’s new name — claims to be “the first handheld console to play Steam games on the go.” The device will play “more than 1,000 games” from Steam’s library on day one, with a hardware spec that will balance performance and cost.

Best part? MicroSD card slot. The rest of the specs are in the article.

To an extent, I almost wish for lower specs and not higher. I don’t want something capable of playing GTA IV on the go – I want something capable of playing the million and a half indie games cluttering up my Steam page. If I could boot this thing up during my lunch break at work, perhaps I would find the time to start playing games like To the Moon, The Walking Dead, and the Legend of Grimrock. The lower the specs, the less expensive the machine, the longer the battery life, and so on.

Incidentally, here is another article about the same handheld, this time with benchmarks:

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) on Low and 1280×720: 16 FPS
• World of Warcraft (2005) on Medium and 1024×768: 43 FPS
• Diablo III (2012) on Low and 1024×768: 38 FPS
• Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) on Low and 1024×768: 16.5 FPS

Technically those benchmarks are for the Radeon 8400E (or Nvidia GT 740M), which is the equivalent graphics card that this thing has. So, yeah, Skyrim is right out, and Diablo 3 isn’t looking too hot either.

That said, do you know what would play just fine? Civilization 5. And Total War: Shogun 2 (although you’d need at least a 64gb microSD card). And a whole host of other similar titles whose only question marks would be whether they’d be able to run in SteamOS in the first place. Details, details.

So what do you guys think? Would a portable Steam player excite you in any way?