With technology finally at a stage where both battery life and processing power is good enough to make handheld gaming both fun and convenient, most of us take a gaming platform with us wherever we go, be that built in to our mobile phone or through a dedicated console.
He's making gaming apps now
We use them in the queue at the supermarket, on the train, in our lunch hours – wherever there’s a spare minute free. But portable gaming really comes into its own when we have a sustained period of time with nothing else to do, such as waiting for a flight. Below are ten choices for the best games* to play while you await your boarding call.
*The three most popular portable gaming platforms are Apple’s iPhone, Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP, so I have focussed my choices on this triumvirate. Also, these are not necessarily indicative of the all-time best games on each platform, rather they are the ones that I felt best suited the situation.
iPhone
Fieldrunners
(see some hardcore Fieldrunning)
Fieldrunners is an exemplary portable ‘tower defence’ game, the idea being the protection of your ‘home base’ by preconfiguring several lines of defence on a limited budget against a marauding enemy. As well as being perfect for a delayed flight (you can lose hours in a single sitting), Fieldrunners is a really beautiful game and a showcase of the iPhone’s graphics pushing power.
Flight Control
(see a 10,000 point game)
For the real sadists at the airport, Flight Control will be a simple reminder of the fact that the flight you are about to board is entirely dependent on people on the ground to get it safely from point A to point B. The premise is simple: you are a flight controller organising colour-coded planes on their way to a series of colour-coded landing strips. You draw the flight path for each individual plane using your finger. That’s it. Until you notice more planes coming into land, and annoying helicopters, and suddenly you’re having to redraw your flight paths all over again to avoid mid-air collisions in a frenzy of nutty gameplay.
Ocarina
(see Stairway to Heaven played on Ocarina)
Not so much a game as an experience. Ocarina turns your iPhone into a musical instrument. Blowing in or across the microphone will play a note, and by holding fingers over strategically placed ‘holes’ on the iPhone’s screen, the note changes. That’s only the beginning. Further options allow you to listen live to other players around the world, with a frankly awesome Google Earth-style animation showing you where in the world the music is coming from. Perfect for hijacking wi-fi during a lonely night at an airport.
Paper Toss
(see Paper Toss accompanied by some wickkido jazz yah)
A hugely simple and ridiculously compelling game, perfect for when you only have a couple of minutes to go or you’re queuing at passport control. The conceit is spot-on: a first-person shooter where the bullets are balls of scrunched up office paper and the office bin is the target. Utilising the multitouch interface to great effect, all that’s needed is a flick of the finger to send the paper bin-wards. But there’s a catch – office fans blow your paper off course, meaning you can’t always flick the paper straight at the bin. Fantastic fun and completely addictive.
DS
Brain Challenge DSiWare
(see a trailer accompanied by some genuinely hideous Eurotrash dance music)
Everyone by now is familiar with the Brain Challenge series on Nintendo DS. One of the best showcases of the DS’s unique interface, the thing that makes Brain Challenge compellling as an airport game is not just its pick up and playability, but also that you don’t have to have the game on your DSi before your get to the airport. You can download Brain Challenge when you get there using that trusty airport wi-fi, making it a suitably cerebral impulse purchase.
Mario Kart DS
(see how to snake in Mario Kart DS to get hyper lap times)
In gaming terms, Mario Kart DS is ancient, but Mario Kart never ages on any platform. A universally adored gaming series, combining the absolute gaming perfection that to this day only Nintendo can offer with an astounding variety of gaming modes, making this a worthy addition to one of Nintendo’s most legendary franchises and perhaps the best single-player Mario Kart experience in the game’s history.
Planet Puzzle League
(see some epic Planet Puzzle Leagueing featuring a x77 combo)
This game thinks like Tetris: take a brilliant idea, add increasing speed, a simple scoring system and some fun shapes and bring to the boil. All you have to do in Planet Puzzle League is line up three similar blocks in a row to remove them from the game. The graphics might be simple but you won’t notice that as you slide blocks frantically around the screen.
PSP
LocoRoco
(see some singing blobs)
Most great travel games take a single innovation or idea and craft the most addictive gameplay possible around that single idea. LocoRoco is no exception. Imagine controlling hallucinatory blobs of colour by tilting the world they live in using the PSP’s shoulder buttons, and you have LocoRoco. A perfect pick up and play game that will entertain you for a few minutes or a few hours while you wait for your plane.
Patapon
(see a song that you won’t ever be able to get out of your head)
If you can’t dance, don’t go anywhere near Patapon. An infectious strategy-lite game that utilises the PSP’s controls as drum pads, it’s an original proposition that is dependent on your ability to get rhythm. Taking the role of a deity, you must guide your subjects on their quest by bongoing out instructions to them in the form of drum beats, the rhythms of which get more complex the further you progress in the game. Combine that with some gorgeous visuals and you have a winner.
Tekken: Dark Resurrection
(see a laser-eyed angel badass kick seven craps out of a wooden Bender)
It may be nearly half a decade old, but one of the PSP’s best early titles remains one of the best. Coming back to Dark Resurrection after playing other fighters is a reminder of just how perfectly balanced the Tekken franchise is. Not only that, the graphics stand up well considering the age of the game and the bonus modes ensure that, even when you’ve exhausted every option in the standard game, there’s plenty more to do. Even better, with the imminent launch of the Sony PSP Go, you can now pick this game up for less money than a sandwich at the airport newsagents.
