Semi-related piece of trivia, since I've been thinking about Monkey Island recently. Monkey Island 5, "Tales of Monkey Island," was released for a bunch of platforms, the most restrictive of which was the Nintendo Wii, which required downloadable games to be no bigger than 40 megabytes.
The team wanted to add a fight scene in a bar that, try as they might, always put them over the 40 megabyte limit on the Wii build. Eventually they gave up and made it an exclusive club that you weren't allowed to go in and had the fight happen off camera. They named the bar "Club 41."
There's also an Elden Ring demake for Gameboy[1] (which Iron Pineapple reviewed favourably[2]), a Bloodborne NES demake[3], and Yarntown which is Bloodborne demade as Zelda[4].
In summary, I don't think the art of handheld[5] demakes is at all lost.
There's also a de-make of the intro to Disco Elysium[0]; because the game is so text-heavy, the entire script can't fit into a 128kb Game Boy cartridge.
Along the same lines, there's also the "fantasy console" Pico-8[1], which is designed to mimic the limitations of old handhelds, but with some modern development improvements. It features a number of de-makes, including Street Fighter[2], DOOM[3], and OutRun[4], which can be played in a browser.
My favorite handheld port is this fan-made port of Tomb Raider to GBA. It's not even a demake, just a really optimized re-implementation of the engine.
It really is something to watch a longplay of a demake you played years ago on a television years later after totally forgetting the experience - I think it makes you appreciate the speed of the motion and the compression of the information in 3d space. Even the music is compressed - just the synthesis from the gameboy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b26QnlpaVaA
Are there even handheld consoles anymore? The Vita died years ago. I don’t think I have seen a kid with a DS since 2020, they all have switched or iPads now. These sort of demakes are possible bc you know the exact hardware it will run on and can optimize. Mobile is a crap shoot for specs, and you have to target a much broader range of specs.
The Nintendo Switch came out in 2017, and remains quite popular.
You aren't seeing many DS series devices around anymore because it's quite old at this point -- the last major product in the line (New Nintendo 3DS) was released in 2014.
Most recently I think the spirit of this kind of device has been captured in the Playdate (https://play.date), but you're right that there are no new handhelds from the big companies
The Switch has a port of Burnout Paradise from the Xbox 360/PS3 era. The remake is fairly impressive, and may speak to the convergence of mobile and console gaming.
I'd guess the switch is expensive, fragile and large enough that people consider it more transportable than portable. Kids would take it while going on holidays, in the plane, etc but you don't see many kids carrying a switch in the street and playing it in the bus because it doesn't stay in a pocket and require a protective bag.
The same applied to the original gameboy. In fact only the Gameboy Advance SP and maybe the DS Lite were small enough to fit in a kid's pocket.
I used to carry my original DS and PSP in my pocket in middle/high school. They were big but it was doable. Vita was the first I felt was too big particularly because of the analog sticks.
The Steam Deck is a handheld, but blurs the line between PC and console, since it runs Linux (or Windows) and can play most of the Steam game catalog. It's not a flagship console in the sense that developers target it as a platform (yet)
The team wanted to add a fight scene in a bar that, try as they might, always put them over the 40 megabyte limit on the Wii build. Eventually they gave up and made it an exclusive club that you weren't allowed to go in and had the fight happen off camera. They named the bar "Club 41."