I need a suggestion for a game that's preferably involved, long, and easy to pick up and put down again. Why? I need something to put on my laptop to play when there's a break during work so I'm not spending anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour bored to tears with nothing to do.

It has to be able to run on an ATI Mobility Xpress 1100 as well. If that turd of a card doesn't narrow things down A LOT I'm not sure what will. I was planning on play KotOR again. Yeah... Thanks to that chipset, I can't get above 3 frames per second. Even when I turn everything down to ***-ugly settings.

I have Defcon, but that's a yawn inducing game after a bit, even though it is awesome.

Starcraft, Diablo, and The Sims.

red faction, call of duty

Any of the Civ games?

lol wut?

KotOR was involved, and by that I mean that there were a lot of side quests, lots of running back and forth, and things didn't always happen fast. That also made it long. It's also not that hard to play, most of the controls involve clicking interface buttons with the mouse. And it's easy to pick up and start playing, make a little progress, then save and stop when I have to.

I'd like to kinda stay away from shooters and strategy games. I'm not thrilled with the prospect of playing a shooter on my laptop, and I just flat out suck at strategy games. I've never had the mindset for them.

If you liked KotOR, try Baldur's Gate 2, Dungeon Siege (2), Neverwinter Nights...

Fallout 1/2
Civ 2/3/4

Sid Meier's Pirates!

In fact, I think I'm going to install that on my laptop now.

N.

It even has boss mode, where you hit tab and the game halts and goes blank until you hit tab again.

Seconded!

Fallout 1+2. I'd also suggest Fallout: Tactics, but you said you're not particularly strategically minded. To be honest, I think even you'd get something out of it, since you don't really need to play it in a particularly tactical way. It's more of a squad-based shooter.

Baldur's Gate 1+2 are both great games which will run pretty much flawlessly on a laptop. I'd imagine Icewind Dale 1+2 would also fit that description, but I'm still waiting for my copies to arrive

Neverwinter Nights won't look as good as it would on a desktop, but it'll run pretty well.

Along the same lines as Baldur's gate, Siege Of Avalon is a great game too.

Gothic 1+2, although some people find the controlls hard at the beginning. But you can play it with the keyboard, which should be a pluss for a laptop, in my opinion.

Thirded.

EA Sports: Cricket 2004

I didn't like Pirates.

I don't know if it fits your requirement of "long", but HL1's SP (and the Opposing Force expansion) runs on pretty much anything, is enjoyable, and is easy to pick up and put down.

Of course, since it's an FPS you'd need a mouse to play on your laptop.

This game is going to rape my life. It's A-D-D-I-C-T-I-V-E.