Going on a long trip and I'll need some games to keep me occupied on some of the long transit periods, games I've enjoyed on the DS before have been:

Tetris
Puzzle Quest
Sim City
Civilisation Revolution
New Super Mario Bros
Mario Kart DS
Hotel Dusk


Homebrew\Ported stuff too if anyone has any good suggestions? I've got SCUMM on DS set up already and played through most of Doom 2 on it.

phoenix wright series
castlevania: portrait of ruin

Advance Wars?

Cradle of Rome
Bleach

Elite beat agents is pretty fun.

I played 90% of the first pheonix wright but got the s***s with it, you'd exhaust all avenues of attack on a case, have to fail and then at the last minute a ghost would come and save the whole case for me, making all the time I'd spent on it worthless when the game plays itself.

Castlevania I did try but it's not really my bag

Advance Wars I'm not sure about, Japanese games in general don't really do it for me, as much as I've tried to like some of them (Pheonix Wright)

Cradle of Rome? wtf is that, I can't find it on metacritic or wikipedia

Bleach doesn't look like my cup of tea either :/ Spirit Decks?

I did give Elite Beat Agents a good bash multiplayer at work but apart from that I didn't really play it much

last edited by WetWired at 19:39:32 06/Aug/08

I second Advanced wars, both of them.

The Advanced Wars games are some of my favourite games ever. Very limited whacky Japanesieness (skip the cut scenes), just really good strategy games.

It's a puzzle game

If you like puzzles, try Professor Layton and the Curious Village, its like an old school point and click adventure chock full of puzzles, really fun game.

Khel is right with Prof. Layton, also try chocobo tales for a great adventure / mini game / card battler.

Professor Layton is cool, my girlfriend got addicted to that until she'd finished it. As for actual puzzle games, Planet Puzzle League is awesome, I was incredibly addicted to that game for some time.

As far as homebrew goes, there's a really good NES emulator (called NesDS I think), and some pretty good SNES emulators as well (though they don't support games like Starwing and Yoshi's Island, as they used the SuperFX chip).

If you want to be artistic, Colors! is a great little app that turns your DS into a mini Wacom Cintiq, pressure sensitivity and all.

Contra 4.

If you liked the old Contra games or Probotector which go back as far as the NES/SNES then this will be up your alley. Also has 40 mini challenges and can unlock the full Contra and Super C games plus a bunch of the old characters.

Kirby Canvas Curse. It's such a simple concept, but so great. It had me hooked start to finish.

Sonic Rush is unreal. It's the best Sonic game since Sonic & Knuckles. Really fast, great soundtrack too.

As Midda said, Planet Puzzle League is good. I was hooked on it for ages. There is always Pokemon D/P and the others that've been suggested already are pretty great. Though I prefered Dawn of Sorrow more than Portrait of Ruin.

this is what you want

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is an awesome isometric turn-based tactics RPG if you can find a copy

there's a homebrew lemmings floating around as well...

The world ends with you was pretty good, and will keep you occupied for at least 20 hours... although you mention its for travel and there is a chance you will lool like a took playing it, with all the scratching/tapping/blowing etc.

Etrian odyssey (1 or 2) is a decent timesink, although you might look like a psycho when you throw your ds across the plane after dying without saving for the past couple of hours.

EBA is pretty fun, and i seem to come back to it every now and then to try to get a bit further, although it is another ds game that you might find yourself wanting to throw across the room in frustration, and you probably look like a tool playing it.

So to sum up, if these games are for travel, then look for a game that you wont look stupid while playing, and wont turn you into a psycho.

I will also recommend you advance wars.