14.5 Hour night shifts, portable entertainment suggestions

[pintle]

I'm working 14.5 hour night shifts in a breakdown recovery firm's control room. There is only so much playing with GPS truck trackers and exploring the world via google maps that I can put up with, so I was thinking of buying a Psp or DS or something to stop me going nuts in the wee small hours.

Do any of you bastards have suggestions/opinions about the various gaming gadgets available at the moment? (Its going to take something pretty good to persuade me it is better than playing tekken online)

[SpliFF]

Ball in a Cup!

Stewie Griffin: You know, sometimes the old-fashioned playthings are the best.
[cutaway to a commercial]
TV commercial announcer: Hey, kids of America, it's hand-painted, wooden Ball in a Cup! Who needs constant electronic video stimulation when there's Ball in a Cup, Mexico's favorite toy for over 340 years! Toss the ball, catch it in the cup, dump it out of the cup, toss it, and catch it in the cup again. The ball is on a string and attached to the cup, so there's no worry if you don't catch the ball in the cup, and clean-up is as easy as catching a ball in a cup! So why spend another day not catching a ball in a cup when you could be catching a ball in a cup?
Kids: Ball in a Cup, Ball in a Cup, it's a Ball in a Cup!
Boy: Ball in a Cup!
Kids: Ball in a Cup!
...
Stewie Griffin: Oh, no, I didn't catch the ball in the cup! Oh, wait a minute, it's okay because the ball is on a string and attached to the cup.

[REVENGE]

What's your budget? The alternative is getting a decent laptop to DSD all night long.

The portable gadgets available to you are along the lines of PSP / DS, Pandora, iPod Touch, Android tablet, etc. DS is nice if you plan on pirating your games, same goes for the Pandora or iTouch if you want to use emulators.

[pintle]

Laptop/using their bandwidth/games I cannot quit or pause instantly to deal with work if it comes in are not an option.

Trust me I have eyed up the 4 linked 50" lcd monitors on the wall and already thought of Spring...

[Gota]

Wasn't there someone writing about how cool the 3D DS is?

[knorke]

no idea whats cool in the gameboy market atm but if you can use the computers:
open transport tycoon?
http://www.openttd.org/
playable without sound
you can pause at any time (or just leave it running while going afk)
does not fuck up on minimizing, works in windowed mode too

edit
wops, i misread. no pcs

[pintle]

Basically, a school friend of mine is the IT manager (he does report directly to the extremely tech-savvy Operations manager) so I have free license to install stuff/customise my pc. I think I will draw the line, however, at installing explicitly entertainment software. I think I may get into some trouble for that.

I spent ~8 hours yesterday reading forums/wikipedia/news websites. I think I might get back into browser rts at this rate...

edit: transport tycoon is a little too much like what I actually do for work as well, might send me insane

[KaiserJ]

cheap tablet + rooted/custom rom + ebooks, PS RPGs, settlers, openttd, etc etc etc (even nicer if you have wifi there)

[Pxtl]

For cheap tablets, currently the Nook Color is apparently the one to own if you want to go crazy with custom Android mods and you don't want to splurge for an expensive Xoom or something.

[Cheesecan]

Indeed a tablet..movies, games, books, internet, and more funs in a portable format.

[knorke]

http://www.erdenkriecher.de/magic-alchemist/index.html
this is madly popular during some courses
a tetris/bejeweled variant but without the time pressure

[pintle]

Can you run .... erm i forget what its called... SCUMVM? (the "i wanna play simon the sorcerer and monkey island!" virtual machine thing) on a DS somehow?

[knorke]

http://scummvm.drunkencoders.com/#screenshots
seems so

[KaiserJ]

buy five puppies and try to keep them at work while hiding them from your boss; it'll be endearingly hilarious and open the doors to all sorts of adventures, hijinks and shennanigans

[Panda]

Zombie Farm for the iPhone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxtfyX- ... re=related

[Coresair]

I think my nook color is one of my favorite things ever. I installed cyanogen 7 on its internal memory and have been occupied everywhere I go. If I am not reading books, browsing the internet, playing android games, playing emulated games or messing around with paint-like app and such I am sleeping (away from home)

Seriously, its the best possible thing you can spend 250$ on.

Seriously.

[Wombat]

[REVENGE]

Nook Color is a solid choice now that the firmware is maturing. If you want something dual core, the Asus Eee Pad transformer for $399 is pretty good - IPS screen, Tegra 2, 16GB, and has a very good keyboard dock.

[KDR_11k]

Get a DS. Tons of great games on that thing and you can always just close the lid and it pauses the game. Whether you'd want to get a 3DS is up to you, after all the thing is very expensive (250Ôé¼ compared to the 100Ôé¼ Gamestop takes for a used DS Lite with a game) and it'll be a long time before it has an interesting game library. Get all of the Professor Layton and Ace Attorney games you can get your hands on. Also get Picross 3D.

Zombie Farm for the iPhone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxtfyX- ... re=related

That's not a way to waste much time, you'll have to wait many real time hours between action in that game.

[==Troy==]

I strongly suggest getting something android-based.

A good alternative, if you are into computers, is to start developing for android platform, I recently did, when I was on vacation for 3 weeks, and had nothing better to do than play some online RPG. It took about 2 hours to set up SDK/eclipse/environment, and in 1 hour I was already making random live wallpapers/etc.

Especially since coding for android is not as scary as trying to make spring compile...


Well, if you dont want to have anything to do with coding, some MMORPG PvM would be very sensible, considering that in most of them you can reasonably easily hide and not have to spend minutes running back to base/etc.