It’s high time I finally went all-in on Baldur’s Gate 3, right? Photo taken by the author.

Oh No, I’ve Become A PlayStation Portal Dad

And I don’t even have kids!

Back in 2023, Sony released a handheld that can’t actually render any games on its own internal hardware called the PlayStation Portal.

I’ll admit that I scoffed at the device at first. I watched it sell millions of units with surprise and alarm, and figured it just wasn’t “for me.” The internet started calling it the “Dad Station” for its typical use case of letting parents play a game while all the screens in their house were occupied. It was a little like a Nintendo Switch in theory, but with a radically different execution built around video streams.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I got a sudden and wild compulsion to try one out, and so I bought one. It wasn’t even on any kind of holiday sale or bundled with any sort of bonuses…I just decided that the time was right. In part it was because of my own patterns around gameplay. I’ve noticed in the six or so months I’ve owned a Switch 2 that I finish more games more quickly when I can carry them randomly around to different parts of my apartment, and I wondered if that same thing would hold true for my neglected PS5 Pro.

I went from unsure about the whole thing to picking it up every single day since I bought it. I’ve gone from intense Portal skeptic to fan in the course of a month.