~Games on the Move

By Neil Hopkins.

PCs are fine for games playing at home - assuming you have a reasonable 
desk and a big enough corner to put them in that is. With a good SVGA 
monitor and soundcard, the PC can't be beaten - but it's not exactly 
portable, as anyone who has lugged a PC round to a mates house to play 
Deathmatch Doom will testify.

So what can you do if you want to play games on the move?

Well for one thing there are the handheld consoles, namely the Gameboy 
and the Gamegear. 

The Gameboy games are numerous and of variable quality - somehow the 
various Mario games don't quite gell on the small screen - but Tetris 
is and remains an all time classic. The gameboy is available remarkably 
cheaply nowadays, and is worth buying just to be able to play Tetris 
on long journeys.

The Sega Gamegear is a neat little machine with a superb little colour 
screen, good sound and a good, though somewhat limited, choice of games 
of varying genres. Sonic works well on the Gamegear where Mario fails 
on the Gameoy with snazzy, fast moving, colourful graphics and addictive 
gameplay. However the technical sophistication comes at a price - namely 
portability. The Gamegear will chew up a set of six duracell batteries 
in about six hours, and rechargables last about half that time. 
Frustrating and annoying to have spent an hour playing through to the 
last level of Sonic only to the the dreaded low battery light start 
to flash.

As far as portable PCs go, the best that I have seen is the Compaq Aero 
notebook (nothing to do with chocolateas far as I am aware!). The colour 
TFT screen is clear and bright enough to play Doom on, although it does 
tend to smear slightly when the image is moving quickly. Less 
graphically intense games work just fine. Unfortunately there is not 
enough room to install an internal soundcard, but parallel port versions 
are available which might be worth trying. However, 1200 pounds is just 
a tad excessive for a portable games machine!

My favourite portable computer has to be the HP95LX - a full blown dos 
machine with all the usual PDA utilities (phone book, diary, terminal 
emulator, notepad and Lotus 123) that is about the same size as the the 
average pocket diary. Available for about two hundred pounds - or free 
if the company you work for resells Hewlet Packard Unix machines (ahem!).
Battery life is something like forty hours of continuous use which is 
probably about two months given the automatic sleep and resume 
capability. File transfer between the HP95 and a desktop PC is a 
breeze - you can even use windows file manage to drag and drop files 
from one machine to the other using a special serial cable. This was
invaluable on a recent trip to Newcastle where I was able to download the 
latest cheetsheets to read on the train!

Gamesplaying is somewhat limited - no graphics for a start - but what 
there is, is good. I've recently been playing an old text adventure game 
(remember those?) called Skullduggary that would probably seem flat on a 
bigger PC, but is very atmospheric on the small screen. The inbuilt game 
is someting called Tigerfox and is a neat variation on the old Pacman 
theme. A fox runs around a series of forty mazes leaving a trail of dots 
to consume, a tiger also roams the maze trying to catch you. The object 
is simply to catch the fox, ensuring that no dots remain uneaten, 
without being caught by the tiger. Simple in concept, yet each maze 
requires different brain teasing strategies, not to mention nimble 
fingers for negotiating the twists and turns. A superb game - now, 
does anyone out there need any tips ...