Have Games, Must Travel

[Aleck]

I don't know how many other folks on this board get stuck travelling. For most of the year, I manage to avoid business travel -- there's something about spending half of each week living in hotel rooms eating restaurant food schmoozing with colleagues/vendors/clients that just gives me the willies.

Unfortunately for me, we're coming up on travel season, which means (for me) that I'll be spending an increasingly inordinate amount of time on the road between now and Thanksgiving. And rather than watch bad reruns on television, I'm wondering what kind of games the truly hardened road warrior brings with him/her on his travels.

My laptop is a Compaq with Radeon Mobility 3D acceleration, which is just enough to get by. Anyone have any suggestions? I just found a copy of Sacrifice at EB (while I was looking for Jagged Alliance 2, which seems to be missing in action at all three EB's I've checked so far). Anyone have any other suggestions?

[Sam Jones]

When I'm stuck between the twin temptation hell of the minibar and the pay-per-view porn in hotel rooms, I like to boot up Galciv and put the Galaxy to wrongs.

[Union Carbide]

A GBA and any/all of the following titles: Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2, Metroid Fusion, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, any of the Castlevania games. I'm sure others can make more suggestions :)

[Aleck]

When I'm stuck between the twin temptation hell of the minibar and the pay-per-view porn in hotel rooms, I like to boot up Galciv and put the Galaxy to wrongs.

GalCiv -- that's a great idea (esp. since I never had the time to get into it on the desktop).

I suppose I should mention that games that don't require CDs are a serious plus, obviously, as are games that aren't twitchy (twitching with a touchpad doesn't work well).

As for buying a GBA... I've been reluctant to buy any additional electronic toys. I've got too many, and, frankly, want to limit the amount of crap I'm schlepping all across the country. That said, I'll swing into an electronics store (not Best Buy) and see what I've been missing...

Aleck

[Machfive]

You shouldn't have any trouble running Railroad Tycoon 2 on that thing. ;)

[Chris Nahr]

Get a GBA SP, that's a very small and nifty device that people won't even recognise for a game console when it's closed. And it comes with built-in screen lighting, too.

[tromik]

Rails Across America, Day of Defeat (once installed, no need for CD in drive), Age of Wonders 2/SM, Kohan, Civilization (your choice which), Syberia, Tiger Woods/Link 2003.

There you have real time and turn based strategy, multiplayer (if you have a wireless card and are in a wireless zone), sports and adventure.

Now all you need is an RPG...Anachronox?

[Luke M]

Diablo 2

[Sten Friberg]

Ditto the recomendation to buy a GBA SP.
I just bought one myself, after much agonizing about the need for yet another toy.
I bought the GBA SP and six games (Advance Wars 2, Golden Sun, Tactics Ogre, Mario Kart , Wario Ware, and Yugioh worldwide) via eBay and it was really smooth. 10 min to get an account on both eBay and PayPal, every transaction has been really smooth and all the people have been really nice. All in all, I've paid ~$190 for that setup.
So far, I'm loving the system to death. It looks like one of my better entertainment investments.

[MikeSofaer]

I liked Panzer General III as a laptop game.

One of the Infinity Engine games. (Fallout 2, if you haven't played it)

Bookworm

[electragician]

I suppose I should mention that games that don't require CDs are a serious plus, obviously, as are games that aren't twitchy (twitching with a touchpad doesn't work well).

Aleck

I bought Alcohol 120% a while back, and it has eliminated any need for carrying CD's around.

At home, normally the first thing I'll do when installing a new game is to use A120% and make an image of the Play Disc CD, the image file then gets stored on a rather largish partition on my drive set aside for that purpose. The original CD is stored away safe and sound, normally never to be touched again.

The image file, being a perfect 1:1 copy of the CD, can then be mounted in a virtual CD drive. I usually leave mine "perma-mounted" until I'm done with the game, as you can have up to 32 virtual drives in a system. I've yet to see a copy protection scheme that this method won't handle, though anything is possible.

If you're to thrifty to spend the cash on a well laid out application, you can use Daemon Tools (with a bit more effort, at least in the past) to accomplish the same thing for free.

[tromik]

You can't go wrong with a GBA:SP. What with Mario and Luigi (Mario RPG 3) coming out soon.

[JeffL]

My road trip notebook is loaded with the following distractions at the moment:

JA2 Gold
Korsun Pocket
XCom:Ufo
Nethack
Champ Manager 4
Combat Mission:BB
Total War:Medieval

...and some others that don't immediately come to mind. I highly recommend JA2 Gold, plus the large pdf strat guide that you can get from the JA Galaxy website.

[Trixie]

I'd like to add another recommendation in the SP column. That may be completely the opposite of what you want, but I wasn't a very big GBA player and my SP has reinvented portable playing for me.

Unfortunately Nintendo has taken the cheap way out by offering mostly ports, but fortunately they're all of fantastic SNES and NES games, and there are tons of other great titles like the Golden Suns and Advance Wars.

[oink]

If your laptops video card can handle it, a PSX emulator might be some good fun.

FFT on the road? mmm-hmm.

http://epsxe.com/