Asus ROG's first console isn't a joke, it's portable bestiality

I hate April Fool’s Day. Not necessarily the same day, but the mania of tech companies to make product announcements that are jokes, but that everyone agrees with, should come true.

[Esta consola de videojuegos se inspira en la Game Boy pero se puede transformar en una PSP]

When Asus’ gaming brand ROG’s Twitter account announced its first handheld console on April 1, many of us thought history had repeated itself. This day is April Fool’s Day, a kind of April Fool’s Day in which you don’t have to believe everything that comes out on social networks. And that was a shame, because the ROG Ally looked really good.

The Asus ROG console is real

So the reader must imagine my surprise when April 2 rolled around and Asus continued to promote the console. Indeed, it was not a joke, but a real product that was announced on the worst possible day; Fortunately, that seems to be the only bad thing we can say about the ROG Ally at the moment.

And it is that the ROG Ally is presented as one of the most powerful consoles and with the most potential of its kind. Like the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally is actually a computer in a different format and more similar to the Nintendo Switch, with a central screen surrounded by controls. And also like Valve, Asus got access to a custom processor from AMD; but it’s already been a year since the Steam Deck was released, so we expect progress the company has yet to share. What he did say is that it will be the fastest handheld console processor AMD has ever made, which is promising.

Other aspects of the device are also promising, such as the striking white design which appears to have integrated RGB lighting. But the detail that I like the most, personally, is that the ROG Ally will be cCompatible with external graphics workstations

like the ROG XG Mobile, which allows us to use a full graphics card like an Nvidia RTX 3080 with all the graphics power that entails. Yes, in this situation it will be less portable, but it is an option that we will surely appreciate when we want to connect the console to the television, for example.

It’s not that it will lack power on its own, if the promises of the new AMD processor are kept. Asus has already argued that modern games such as Ghostrunners, Steelrising or Resident Evil Village can be run.