Quit bitching about having a netbook with no games to play.
Netbooks are notorious for not being very good gaming platforms, which is 110% true. Try running something like Left 4 Dead on an Intel GMA powered netbook, it’s rather funny seeing it try so hard and ultimately fail. Miserably. But just because it can’t run stuff like Left 4 Dead 2, or for those of you who play it (which, unfortunately there ARE many of you) Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t mean you can’t game on it. So occasionally I’ll be picking examples that you can get off of Steam that will happily run on these picky little bastards. Stock. I don’t have the RAM upgrade in mine because I’m too lazy to take the thing apart and get it in there, so this is stuff that will run on a stock Acer Aspire One netbook with a 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM running Windows XP Home. If you’re running Windows Vista … for one why the hell would you touch that with a 10 foot pole … or Windows 7, can’t help you that much. Anywhere, here we go with the first one. And by the way, these aren’t specifically geared toward netbooks, ANY kind of computer (in some cases almost literally) are good for these because, mostly, they’re just great games.
Quake. Not Quake 2, 3, 4 or Enemy Territory (I’ll get to those some other time) … the ORIGINAL from 1996 that is almost totally different from every other game in the series. It’s quite possibly one of the finest first person shooters ever made and has stood the test of time beautifully over the years. It’s fast paced, frantic, balls to the wall and just TONS of fun. I’ve been playing it on Nightmare difficulty since I snagged it again on Steam and I’ve found that while I do want to get through the levels and win, most times it doesn’t happen because the game is just that hard. I mainly treat it as “how spectacularly can I die”. Cowering behind cover waiting for your health to replenish doesn’t happen here. If you hide behind a corner, the enemies will just flush you out and waste you. This game definitely REALLY messes with the Halo and Call of Duty crowd just because it’s so bloody fast. Now, when you originally snag this off of Steam, it’s really going to throw some people off because this game came out in that transitional phase where people were JUST getting into using the mouse to aim let alone being able to look up and down, so some reconfiguration of they keys are needed, and you need to enable mouse look (open up the console with the “`” key and type in “+mlook”) … but that doesn’t help the vomit inducing stock resolution of 320x200, jack that up to 1024x768 and you’re good to go. Or if you want an even better experience with updated graphical effects and some of the wildest multiplayer you’ll ever come across, install nQuake on top of it. I’m not going to get into here, you can hit up the Steam forums for the game if you need help, but you definitely won’t be sorry. Or maybe you will be if you come across a top tier player in Deathmatch because it doesn’t matter how good you think you are in Call of Duty, you will definitely learn a lesson in humility playing against one of those guys. And please, for the love of all things holy, DON’T try to configure your Xbox 360 controller to this game.
If you want to learn more about it, check out this link at Mobygames.
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