I guess the ps2/xbox era along with the handhelds like the DS and PSP included. There was just an unreal amount of games being made for everything and games still took chances. I think getting my PSP when it launched was peak excitedness for gaming because of how new and cool it all felt. I still have my original PSP, the only thing I lost was the charger but picked up a 3rd party gamestop branded knockoff that works perfectly fine.

Now we can just play the best looking games on mobile and not even think twice about how incredible that is, except they created such a shit genre with rules that almost every mobile game follows that killed any chance of them being any good. Also steamdeck is crazy impressive as well, but it is pretty big compared to any old school handheld.