Mobile gaming and handhelds

I have two business trips lined up this month, each of which will have me staying 3 nights in some hotel room. So obviously I'm thinking of mobile gaming. :) What should I take with me to pass the time?

First obvious candidate is my laptop. That one has been proven to be useful for mobile entertainment in many ways: playing games online and offline, playing music CDs, and even playing DVDs. Additional advantage is that lugging a laptop around makes you look a lot more professional than being seen with a handheld gaming console. :) The only negative point is that the laptop is big and heavy, but as long as you just play in a hotel room, it is a good solution. I just need to think ahead and install the games I want to play. Amazon just sent me an e-mail that my copy of Civ4 is in the mail, and that one is an obvious candidate for playing on a laptop. I will also receive X3, but that one I suspect to be difficult to control on a laptop, and it will maybe run too slow on it. Sid Meier's Pirates! is already installed on the laptop, and I bought an external numblock to control it better. So I'm all set.

The existing alternative to mobile gaming is my only handheld console, a Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP. With its silver color and clamshell design it looks faintly like a PDA, but I'm afraid that once I'm playing on it, it becomes far too obvious what it really is. Not something you want to be seen with during a serious scientific conference, thus it would also be banned to the hotel room. I got a range of games to play on the Gameboy: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Pokemon, Harvest Moon, and more. But while this is the type of game I like to play, it isn't really the optimal type of game for mobile gaming. It is really hard to play a game like that for some hours, then let it rest for weeks because you are back home, and then restart on your next business trip. So I just ordered two more games for the Gameboy, classic arcade games that have been ported to the handheld: Rampage, and Gauntlet. As arcade games these are easy to pick up anytime, there is no long-term involvement.

When they came out, I thought about buying one of the other handheld gaming consoles, but then decided against it. If somebody lends me his Nintendo DS, I'd really like to play Nintendogs for half an hour, but only to see what makes this such a smash hit. Tamagotchi type games never hold my attention for very long, once I've learned how they work they become uninteresting to me. And I just don't see me yelling "sit" into a handheld console microphone to make a virtual puppy obey me, I'd feel somewhat silly.

Nor was I really convinced about the PSP. I see it as a typical example of how designers go for more speed and better graphics, instead of good gameplay. Most of the PSP games are twitchy games, half of the lineup seems to consist of different racing games. Watching movies on UMD discs that cost a fortune and run on no other device wasn't my thing either. The PSP might be the only handheld that allows you to watch porn, either on UMD or on an expensive large memory stick, but I wonder if that is really driving sales all that much.

I think I'll survive with the laptop and Gameboy. There are a few games on each of the new handhelds that I would have liked to try, for example Metal Gear Acid for the PSP sounds interesting. But not interesting enough to justify spending €300 on the console plus game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link