By Evan Ackerman
What with my mildly sexual love affair with my netbook and all, I was excited to see Liliputing’s list of 5 recently released games that will run on a netbook. It’s a worthwhile reminder that you don’t need a huge amount of processing power and a dedicated graphics card for some satisfying gaming… Sometimes a $300 netbook can get the job done. Here’s the list:
1. Torchlight
2. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
3. Sins of a Solar Empire
4. Trials 2 Second Edition
5. World of Warcraft
Not that I play WoW, but if I did, which I don’t, I would be able to personally attest to the fact that if you crank the graphics way down, you can get playable framerates as long as you don’t take on multiple mobs or get into areas with a lot of player traffic. That’s my guess, anyway. ::cough::
Of course, there are tons of other games that your netbook won’t choke on… My three picks, after the jump.
Here’s three games that I’ve had running just fine on my netbook, which is an MSI Wind running Windows XP with 2 gigs of RAM and overclocked (using the sweet factory overclocking option) by 15%:
StarCraft – StarCraft was released in what, 1998? I don’t think it actually runs at anything better than 640×480, and the minimum requirements are a P90 and 16 mb of RAM. This one’s a no-brainer.
Diablo 2 – The quintessential mindlessly addictive kill monsters and loot them x ? game that is still somehow fun to this day. Another pretty old game, it’ll run fine on a minimum of hardware.
Heroes Of Might and Magic 5 – The AI takes a while to finish its turn, and large battles get a little sluggish, but it’s definitely playable. If you want better performance, try HOMM3, which is a better game anyway.
The MSI Wind Games List has a couple hundred other games that people have gotten to run successfully on their netbooks, including things like Doom 3, F.E.A.R., and Far Cry. While I’m sure these games will technically run, stick with stuff from the above lists for games that you’d actually enjoy playing on an underpowered computer. And remember, netbooks are only underpowered for games that came out after like 2004 or so… As long as you’re 10 years behind the times, you’ve got all kinds of retro-awesome games to choose from.
[ Liliputing ] VIA [ Gearfuse ]
