When you’re stuck on-the-go with only your phone to save you, Greg Costikyan tries to help you have fun. He’s a consultant to many in the mobile games industry; no back seat driver, he also designs games himself. He also happens to keep a blog, where he shares his thoughts about the trends and interactions of mobile and non-mobile gaming.
So what do I carry? At present:
An N-Gage. No chortles from the back row, please. I have to admit that I’m more interested in its potential than its current reality; I’m a multiplayer gamer, and we need a decent mobile networked platform. The current games don’t thrill me—the only networked one I have is Red Faction, which is playable in multiplayer Bluetooth mode, but you need to be within 10 meters of someone else with an N-Gage and a copy of Red Faction, which hasn’t happened yet. I’m hoping we’ll see versions of good multiplayer games games like TibiaME and Laser Squad Nemesis soonish, however. I’m considering getting a Bluetooth headset so I don’t look like a doofus while talking on the thing—but then, I don’t actually use it as my main phone, which is …
A Sanyo SCP-4900 Dual. No longer a top-of-the-line phone, but I got it as soon as Sprint launched their PCS Vision service. Decent-size color screen, runs J2ME (and BREW, but Sprint doesn’t support BREW even though they’re a CDMA carrier). Sprint does a pretty good job with mobile games—second only to Verizon in the US, in terms of game revenue. It’s a little embarassing, actually; for one thing, my company doesn’t have any games live with Sprint at the moment, and I’ve been tempted to switch to Verizon for that reason. Second, Nokia’s been quite good to my pocketbook—and it’s a little embarassing to be standing in the Nokia booth at E3 and whip out a Sanyo phone to answer a call… For years, Sprint didn’t offfer any Nokia phones (they now offer the 3588i), largely because Nokia hasn’t been a real player in the CDMA market until recently.
Palm 505. Also not a high-end device, and it wasn’t when I bought it. I don’t expect to play games (well, other than FreeCell) on a PDA—if I did, I’d probably get a WinCE device instead—and I don’t really want to view web pages or deal with email on it. (In my case, email is 90% spam—my email address has been a mailto URL on my web pages since the early 90s, and I’m sure I’m on every spamlist in creation. I’d much rather get my email on a computer configured with my filters, and I surely don’t want to pay airtime or data transfer fees to download crap.) It does what I ask of it—datebook and address book—I’m comfortable with Graffiti and don’t need a thumboard, and Vindigo is my friend.
That’s really about it, unless you want to count the 250 MB Zip disk that goes almost everywhere—I run back and forth between my apartment and my girlfriend’s several times a week, and I keep all the stuff I’m working on on the disk, so it’s available in both places.
I’m between laptops at present—the one I used to use (my girlfriend’s, actually) was shipped out recently to a friend in Italy who needed a computer. For now, I get by with dumping presentations and such onto a CD when I need to speak at a conference—there’s usually a machine I can use. The problem, of course, is technolust—I can’t bring myself to buy a cheap laptop, because if it doesn’t have a 3D card with at least 64MB onboard, I’m not going to be able to play much in the way of modern games. So whatever I do wind up getting is going to set me back a bare minimum of $1200 bucks… Once I’ve done my taxes and have a better idea how much money I have to ship the gummint, I’ll take another look.
One other item I ought to mention is that I often travel with a voltage regulator and a handy pack that contains about a dozen plug adaptors, so I can plug shit in while in Europe.
As far as the “gadget bag” itself, there isn’t one. In the winter, the pockets of my jacket suffice; in summer, I’ve taken to wearing carpenters’ pants rather than jeans, for the sake of their more copious pockets. And there are the panniers on my bike, which gets me around the city.
