For college, I'll be getting a laptop. I'm looking for one that's affordable and can run the latest games very well. Got any suggestions? HP looks nice, but I'd like to know if there are better deals out there.

These are pretty much mutually exclusive requirements. Proper gaming laptops are very expensive.
If you need a gaming laptop, go for a model by some company that makes "custom" laptops. They can usually deliver specs tailored exactly to your needs, which may be quite a lot cheaper than buying a pre-configured gaming laptop. You might also be able to order the PC without a bundled OS (don't know if you need one) to further reduce the costs.
The above is exactly what I did for a new gaming laptop. Cut the price by loads by properly configuring the hardware to suit my needs.

HP has extremely affordable laptops my parents brought me a high end gaming laptop for uni for only $2200nz around $1500us. Which is good in comparasion to other brands with similar specs. It runs crysis med to high and every new game without problem, so yeah I would recommend HP.

The HP ones look pretty cheap, but I'm not sure if I can keep it cheap and make it run games in a powerful fashion. It's cheaper than Alienware, that's for sure.

Trust ASUS, and trust me too.
Why?
2 year no questions asked warranty
4 day turn around time for repairs (gpu fan was slow,they fixed it & sent it back in 4 days flat!)
1 year battery replacement
An actual telephone number to call when you need help, not a bloody 800 tele!
Specs on my ASUS laptop.
N80V series
Core 2 Duo T5800 2.0 Ghz
4 GB RAM
250 GB HDD
Standard 5 USB ports and a nice DVD burner
and last but not least the beast on this baby...
9650m GT with 1 GB of Video RAM, plays well everything on high, FarCry 2 , Mass Effect, Mirrors Edge, and Fallout 3 it runs calmly too.
oh yeah and UT 3 runs on ULTRA w/motion blur on around 30-50 FPS.
Price and other thoughts:
$800 only from Newegg
Wish it had XP instead of Vista, going to buy Windows 7 in October for this guy.
Here is the link for the newest model, pick it up at your local Best Buy.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat177800050007&type=category
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Some may not believe all this hype i'm giving, but this is the single greatest use of 800 dollars I've ever spent, I could not be happier with my laptop from ASUS, its my main PC.
I do all my gaming, 3D work in Maya on it and all my rendering on it, its always great to me.
Cheers and stay away from Apple!

Nice!
Brother, I will always stay away from Apple, except for iPods.
That ASUS looks pretty awesome, but it's missing Blu-Ray, 1 TB hard drive and such. For that price, though, I am VERY interested in this laptop.

Good luck finding a gaming Laptop with a Blu-ray, and a 1TB HD.. gamign laptops do not come with them usually because games for the PC do not use that format yet. and 1TB is simply overkill.
personally I have a Gateway
http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668231.php

you can add a bigger HD later but the Blu-Ray is totally not necessary.
And a gaming laptop will have the horsepower to do any sort of rendering or editing you'd need to do.

Or simply get an external hard drive (or two) if you need more storage space. Use these to archive and the internal one to work on films if you go down that route.
And ye, I like Asus laptops, too.

i don't have a specific recommendation for a gaming laptop
but as owner of several laptops over the years, i can vouch for asus as a company that puts out exceptional products
and i have to say that my only gateway laptop was an absolute piece of crap. broke in five places with minimal use (minimal use because it came loaded with so much bloatware it's poor processor chugged along and no one wanted to deal with the slow computer)

I graduated in Computer Animation from Full Sail University, they too have a great Film program and awesome equipment there.
At anyrate it depends on the software you will use during your major.
Please post those and I can recommend the exact laptop you need based on the software.
A guess right now would say that the 900$ ASUS I talked about would be sufficient.
I did alot of work for my demo reel on my ASUS laptop, feel free to check it out.
www.yazfx.synthasite.com

You did all that? Awesome, not only on the laptop, but on your abilities! I am very sold. In a few weeks' time, I will be able to buy this. Looking forward to it!

I can't help myself but give this mighty midget some serious rep for what it was attempting to achieve.
Its crazy in comparison to what you can buy now for its original price tag.

Thanks, but mate, do you know what software you will be using?