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 ]
Plants Vs Zombies. Only computer game i have ever finished and i replayed the whole game 5 times!
So basically, you can use the netbook to level your alts or doing dailies on WoW but forget about doing raids or hearthing to Dalaran?
I played a game with my netbook last week. It's called smash the little laptop against the wall. Unfortunately it causes some of what would be termed catastrophic damage. On the bright side they only cost $200-$300. Pocket change in my world of wealth and status!
And when I woke up…..
A couple of games not on the list that will play on an MSI Wind:
Settlers 4 (No lag)
Eve-Online (Lots-o-lag, but able to change skills, etc)
I don't have a netbook, but my Latitude D630 (dual core 2.4ghz, 2GB ram, Intel 945 graphics) plays all of those games well except for Starcraft! When I start building tons of units, the cpu temp passes 220F and the system shuts down (running i8kfangui which shuts the system down…better than the bios temp control that just powers off with no warning).
Age of Empires and Empire Earth are very similar, but even with tons of units, neither game gets my temp over 190.
Some of the temp issue may be because I have a 320GB HDD installed instead of the 40GB the system shipped with. With the old HDD, temp never peaked over 160, so a netbook should have no problem there.
Oh, another great netbook game would be Continuum which originally came out as Subspace in 1996 or so and still has thousands of players today because it runs great on a 486 with dialup, and it's actually TONS of fun. Huge multiplayer space combat, tons of servers, etc!
http://www.subspacedownloads.com/
Diablo 2?? Aren't we waiting on 3 now? I can't let a laptop slow me down like that. *hugs her desktop*
They're now saying 2011 or something on Diablo 3… >:(
Even I am crazy for games as my favourite game is GTA 4 and
I like Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and World of
War craft from the your list. This is an amazing portable laptop.
Facilities Management
But netbook screens are so small, how are you supposed to enjoy playing games on them? Unless you think of them like a big ds or psp, then I guess it's okay, except for the lack of ability to play ds and psp games.
But netbook screens are so small, how are you supposed to enjoy playing games on them? Unless you think of them like a big ds or psp, then I guess it's okay, except for the lack of ability to play ds and psp games.