By Alec Meer on April 23rd, 2010 at 11:33 pm.
Suffering from an acute case of Old Man Shoulder due to schlepping around the country with a fully size laptop in my bag, I’ve invested in a netbook. I hope and pray I’ve done this in timely enough fashion to save myself from tragic hunchbackery. This is important and fascinating news to you all, I’m sure, but the reason for this post is an interest in where low-spec gaming is these days. I know, I know, netbooks are rubbish for games and by buying one I’m condemning myself to a lifetime of soullessly replaying Monkey Island and muttering about those damned kids and their good-for-nothing pixel-shaders. Oh, wait, that’s poppycock.
It’s eminently possible to construct a PC capable of playing pretty much any modern game for around £300, but it’s a very different state of affairs for netbooks, saddled as they are with Intel’s poxy GMA 950 integrated graphics. It shares system memory and it lacks the shader grunt to cope with most modern retail games. That doesn’t make it irrelevant.
From my own experience, that ubiquitous GMA 950 chip can, of course, handle any 2D stuff you throw at it (so a lifetime of Kongregate titles awaits, for instance), but couldn’t cope with the recently-released-on-PC P.B. Winterbottom due to pretty shader effects. At a pinch, I can make it run World of Warcraft, but not in a way which would be pleasant for me or anyone I was playing with. GTA Vice City, meanwhile, ran as smooth as butter, and Trackmania with all the settings minimised was rather a delight. There is some gold in them thar integrated hills.
It’s easy to scoff at these cheap, chuntering machines, but the rise and rise of undemanding 2D stuff like Maple Story, Dofus and Farmville is, like it or not, fundamental to modern PC gaming. It would be foolish to dismiss netbooks purely because they can’t play TF2.
So, really, I wanted to poll you lot to see what kind of gaming success you’re having with low-end machines. PC gaming is moving fascinatingly away from being about maximum graphicsosity – but is trying to be a habitual gamer on integrated graphics truly possible? Share!
23/04/2010 at 23:42 robrob says:
I’ve been laptop bound for a while now and this is what’s been occupying my time:
Spelunky
Dwarf Fortress
Desktop Dungeons
Freespace 2
Outcast
Flotilla
Darklands
X-COM
Civ IV
OpenTTD
Sleep is Death
Medieval 2: Total War
And lots more. These have been the biggest recent timesinks though and all of them run fine on my rubbish integrated graphics so you should have no problems on something that copes with Trackmania. You start off lusting after games like Mass Effect 2 but once you accept your fate and adjust your expectations, it’s fine. Darklands is giving me a lot of enjoyment at the moment, I’ve found it far more engaging than a lot of other more recent RPGs. FPSs aren’t catered too so well but obviously if you can handle Source then there is a huge range of games you can play.
24/04/2010 at 03:07 mandaya says:
Dwarf Fortress? you’re kidding. apart from lacking a keypad, DF will reduce any netbook to heat death.
what’s playable, of course, are the old bioware classics, Baldur’s Gate or Plabescape:Torment. combined with the high-res-patches, that’s lots of nostalgic gaming for any netbook.
24/04/2010 at 08:40 robrob says:
2010 chugs along but previous versions work fine for me until you start getting huge amounts of dwarves. I’ve never struggled without a keypad either, what does DF use the keypad for?
24/04/2010 at 11:36 Alexander Norris says:
That really isn’t what “heat death” means. :P
(It means the exact opposite of overheating.)
24/04/2010 at 12:35 Tei says:
You can always disable some stuff, like framerate and “wheater effects”. I use to play normally with my EEPC, and now I have a much better netbook. So no.. DF is netbook friendly with a few changes.
24/04/2010 at 19:11 Zyzzi says:
My laptop only supports DX7 (so worse than most netbooks). The only game I play on it is RollerCoaster Tycoon :v
24/04/2010 at 20:10 Snall says:
Dwarf can be done on a crap laptop-..not the NEW one, but old GL 4d.
23/04/2010 at 23:42 Bryan says:
I use Steam for all my games and the only thing I have played on my Acer Aspire One is Audiosurf. It seems to play just fine.
23/04/2010 at 23:43 Metalfish says:
Popcap are obviously quite good for this sort of thing. Chris Sawyer’s games are also good. Diablo2, starcraft, theme hospital, red alert series. Though I’d quite like some turn-based stuff ‘cos touchpads are poo.
23/04/2010 at 23:48 CaptainHairy says:
Netbook gaming experiences for me:
Deus Ex runs like a champ, as does Half-Life.
I’ve had Morrowind running at a playable framerate with everything turned off and the optimiser running in the background making sure that any time anything interesting is happening my view distance drops to about 5 feet so I can still move in non-bullet time.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 works fantastically, and surprisingly for such an old game, even has the option to display in 1024×600. Reminds me, I should probably whack OpenTTD on the thing.
Strangely, Popcap games tend to run poorly on it, even with the effects turned down Peggle doesn’t run at full speed.
In addition, a lot of free games tend to run at full speed. I’ve got Every Extend and Spelunky on the it, and they both run well, although Spelunky’s Game Maker pedigree means it chugs a bit every now and then.
And of course, anything turn based, such as Alpha Centauri and my recent favourite plaything Desktop Dungeons will not really get kicked in the pants a whole lot by poor computing performance, other that making a large number of NPC factions take more time than usual to take their turns.
23/04/2010 at 23:50 CaptainHairy says:
In addition, if I were to be buying a netbook right now instead of relying on the trust Eee 901 that I currently have, I’d look into getting the Dell Mini 311. One of the very few netbooks with the ION chipset, that packs quite a lot more punch than the puny GMA 950.
24/04/2010 at 00:04 Rosti says:
@CaptainHairy – Seconding the Deus Ex shout. Played it for the first time (sort of missed it, see..) on my Eee PC whilst zipping around the country. Lovely time, that.
Old men…. ARE THE FUTURE!
24/04/2010 at 13:52 Jesse says:
Morrowind…optimiser?
Thank you sir!
23/04/2010 at 23:50 Stark says:
I keep meaning to try EVE on my netbook. I wonder if I can dial things down enough for it to work. It’d be super handy to be able to just lounge around doing low-impact EVE stuff, mining or easier missions, on the go or on the couch instead of at the desk.
24/04/2010 at 09:31 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
You’ll be disappointed…I had to play Eve CLASSIC on Dual-Core 1.8GHz, 2GB of RAM and INTEL GM x3100 and it ran very very poor…I was so glad when I finally saved the money for 9600gt 512MB
24/04/2010 at 23:05 Paul B says:
If you have Nvidia Ion graphics in your netbook, then it’s very possible to run Eve. I used to run Eve Online at 1920×1080 on my old mac mini (with Ion 9400M GPU). There was a little bit of slowdown but it was playable. Play it on a smaller, lower res, netbook screen and I’m sure it will be quite a smooth experience.
23/04/2010 at 23:51 Larixk says:
Just subtract 1 from the version of the latest released game in any great series, and it will run great:
So Civilization 3, not 4. Age of Empires 2, not 3. Caesar 3, not 4. Half Life 1, not 2. etc.
What I’m meaning to say is, there are plenty of good old games out there, that run smoothly on any netbook. Just don’t expect to run Crysis or GTA4. The older titles are also getting easier to get by, not only the budget bin, but also steam and gog.com offer plenty of games with low system requirements but high value.
23/04/2010 at 23:58 stuartfinlay says:
Don’t bother with Dwarf Fortress on a netbook. The CPU just can’t cut it.
24/04/2010 at 01:41 Will says:
Unless your home PC is running remote desktop and dwarf fortress and then you log into it remotely… (Slightly) Complicated setup, but can play DF anywhere there is decent internet.
25/04/2010 at 20:31 Zanchito says:
I’m running DF40#d18 with Mayday tileset on an Asus 1.6Ghz +1.5GB RAM and it works rather nicely.
24/04/2010 at 00:00 Elyas says:
SCUMMVM!
24/04/2010 at 00:02 Mario Figueiredo says:
Once my oldest daughter kind of demanded me to get her a netbook and I acquiesced, I’ve been playing with it a little. I’m mildly curious about them, although my use of personal computers and especially how I use the internet have pretty much ruled them out as an option for me.
Heavy mouse requirement games are pretty much NOT what you want. As metalfish says above, “touchpads are poo”. But turn mouse-centric based games are ok.
I’m a sucker for emulators and old games. If you are too, you’ll be alright. I have her netbook installed with DOSBox and Spectaculator (or ZXSpin for a freeware alternative). Ran beautifully. I tried Mame, but that’s already too demanding, even on older arcade titles.
24/04/2010 at 00:05 Malfernion says:
I recently picked up an asus netbook with the intel gma3150 (a tiny amount better than the 950) and ive been using it to play games that i never got round to playing before, like planescape torment, outcast, ottd and various others. Also been using it for frozen synapse and sleep is death. I think ive been playing higher quality games on the netbook than on my desktop recently actually…
24/04/2010 at 00:12 darkripper says:
I used to play Eve on my Samsung Nc10, due to my main pc being broken. All set to low res and graphic, and with the game zoomed as far off as possible (so the game doesn’t draw any ship model) or with the star map open. It’s not perfect, but you can do pretty much everything this way, maybe even pvp. As long as there aren’t too many things in the overview the game is responsive. If you don’t feel like playing without seeing your ship and your enemies, you can stay docked, set skillqueues and scam people in local.
24/04/2010 at 00:20 Znea says:
I just spent three months traveling around SEA and NZ with an Acer Aspire 1410 and found my flights noticeably more enjoyable by the addition of Total Annihilation, Age of Empires 2, C-Evo (because the copy of Civ 2 I had was old enough not to run in 64-bit land), and Heroes of Might and Magic 3. All ran with nary a hiccup, and my back was only slightly askew.
24/04/2010 at 00:20 RazorBlade79 says:
(I have the mini311 which has an Ion GPU so YMMV)
I’ve played a lot of Civ4, SNES games (in full HD res no less, with my wireless adapter via 360 gamepad on tv), and half the games I got from gog.com. Just fired up Deus Ex (works good), WoW is good, WC3 works perfectly. Quake Live works great, Lord of Ultima is unplayable (Javascript kills atom cpus)
there are also a ton of indie games on steam which work great, like Aquaria, Puzzle Quest (is it actually considered indie?don’t know) and I guess world of goo shoud work as well.
with Flash RC2 on Ion most flash games work great, youtube 720p is no big deal either btw.
25/04/2010 at 08:05 ascagnel says:
What browser are you running?
Seriously. Chrome (and by extension, Chromium) compiles JavaScript into native assembly (a la a normal compiler like GCC), while Firefox and IE 8 still interpret it on-the-fly (more similar to Java, but not the best example). If LoU runs in Chrome, try that, and see if it helps at all. The disadvantage is a slightly longer load time for the low-level compile.
Remember: Chrome was built when Google decided that even Firefox didn’t have good enough JavaScript performance to run their web apps with desktop-style speed.
24/04/2010 at 00:20 Bennet says:
Torchlight actually has a native netbook resolution. I was so excited when I saw that, even though I’ve so far refrained from actually installing it on my netbook for fear I’d never get any work done again…
24/04/2010 at 00:22 RazorBlade79 says:
ooh how could I forget Torchlight… The games works ok, nothing compared to desktop pc but playable. But the loading times kill my wish to play it on a netbook really fast. Still great game if you need to kill lots of time on trains or airports.
24/04/2010 at 13:47 trjp says:
Torchlight on Netbooks is a bit crap – that “Netbook mode” is an over-optimistic idea.
Netbooks grind to a halt in busier areas and Torchlight as a whole has soul-crushingly-long loading times which make it unsuited here…
Guild Wars – however – plays really well. There’s even a flag to make it run in DX8 mode which is even better in FPS terms…
24/04/2010 at 00:36 Fede says:
I’m rather happy of my notebook (eee 1005HA), I can run almost everything which doesn’t require resolutions over 1024*600 or 1024*768.
Played recently:
Dwarf Fortress (3*3 fortress, so CPU won’t be a problem)
Constellation (if someone wants to buy it, send me a pm to get my referral)
Within a Deep Forest / Knytt / Knytt Stories
World of Goo
Machinarium
Sacrifice
The Spirit Engine 2
Death Rally
Spelunky
Roguelikes (FAAngband, Unangband, ToME)
IFs
and lots of older games running with Dosbox, for example:
Floor 13 / Conflict: Middle East
24/04/2010 at 00:48 Monchberter says:
Can I ask Alec what OS you are running? I have a nearly 2 year old MSI Wind (first ‘good’ 10″ netbook) that will run a few things, but having stuck Windows 7 on it, even the likes of Half-Life and Deus Ex start to struggle and i’ve often found that just plugging a mouse in will use a huge amount of memory and CPU.
25/04/2010 at 11:36 Alec Meer says:
I’ve stuck with XP for now, but toyed with putting 7 on it.
24/04/2010 at 00:51 Springy says:
Tooled up my Acer Aspire 1410 with Torchlight, World of Goo and Half-Life. Also, Good Old Games might not realise it, but they’ve got a beautiful archive of netbook-friendly gaming.
24/04/2010 at 14:14 aDelicateBalance says:
I also have the Acer Aspire 1410 and although it’s not going to run Portal or TF2 playably, it is a fine machine. I’m always looking for more games that will run on it, but I’ve already gone through Plants vs Zombies, World of Goo and Defence Grid: The Awakening as well as spending quite a bit of time playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe and Sim City 4. Just a shame Sim City 4 doesn’t do netbook resolutions.
24/04/2010 at 00:54 Lewis says:
Alec, does this mean I can throw the Develop “you look like a war reporter” gag back at you now?
24/04/2010 at 01:46 Jaz says:
How appropriate! You look like a… war?
24/04/2010 at 01:02 Radiant says:
As awful as it sounds I see the majority of pc users [ie the huge percent of the world not using apple or linux] as moving towards smaller nimble CHEAPER netbooks.
Essentially people just want MIME: Movies, Internet, Music and Email.
The major misconception being that to play games on a pc you need a £600-£700 beast of a desktop that you can upgrade or a £1000-£2000 [!] laptop that gets outdated in two years.
That simply isn’t true any more.
I just bought myself a shed load of components including a quad core 3.5 ghz [over clocked to quad core 4ghz] cpu and a dx11 capable card.
Now I looked around to see what games to test the tiny god on and found that:
- There are only SIX games that can take my pc to task
- Two of which are the same game and are from 2007 [crysis + natural mod and warhead...it shat on both of them]
- Three of them are set in the fucking jungle [Just cause 2]
- The other 3 are mass effect 2, DOW2 and GRID [fucking LOVE GRID].
Every other game I wanted to play and show off the new pc graphics on was a bloody xbox port that looked EXACTLY the same as the xbox version [Assassins Creed 2 I'm looking at you].
All the netbook manufacturers need to do is put a TINY bit more effort into the graphics chip [GMA 950 doesn't cut it] and I don’t think I’ll upgrade the desktop again.
24/04/2010 at 02:02 2ds says:
The manufacturers have little to do with it, they’re stuck with intels crappy GMA950 too.
In fact, it uses about 10x more power than the actual processor and runs like a dog, everyone hates it.
Intels next gen integrated graphics is finally up to par with AMD’s 2 year old 3200 so this whole situation should start to improve with the next generation of netbooks which are coming out now.
Also as mentioned by several people you can go for the ION.
Also I tried torchlight and wasn’t impressed with the netbook mode, I still didn’t find it smooth enough on a GMA950
24/04/2010 at 01:03 EthZee says:
I don’t have one of your fancy “netbooks”, but I do have a five-year-old Dell Latitude laptop that can’t run Source games. I get along fine; I’m playing through the older titles in my collection. I can play Q3 engine games fine (Jedi Knight II: Outcast runs almost perfectly), Operation Flashpoint runs quite well on high settings, Deus Ex runs beautifully, etc.
24/04/2010 at 01:04 Thants says:
Roguelikes are always good, if that’s your kind of thing. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is the best, clearly. Well, apart from Dwarf Fortress, which is a different type of thing. The tiles version is quite good as well.
I haven’t actually tried running it on a netbook, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work.
24/04/2010 at 02:48 LionsPhil says:
DCSS runs great on the EeePC 701—their interface reshuffles itself to fit perfectly in the 800×480 resolution.
24/04/2010 at 01:09 Radiant says:
But to answer your question you can run Street fighter 4 turned all the way down fairly well [it's a surprisingly demanding game to lock it at the steady 60fps it needs to be at].
But then you’ll ALWAYS be carrying a couple of pads around with you too so it evens up. SF4 with a travelling companion on a long train/plain ride is an awesome experience.
Actually pretty much the majority of pc games that are built on engines that spit out pc, xbox and ps3 code [unreal engine and capcoms wonderful mt-framework mostly] can run on the majority of netbooks with everything turned heartbreakingly down. Just be prepared for gaming at 800X600 – 640×480 and 15 fps.
24/04/2010 at 01:14 Mr_Day says:
You can use netbooks on planes? I thought they asked you to turn them off, along with Game Boys and Kindles.
24/04/2010 at 01:17 Vinraith says:
@Mr_Day
Non-broadcasting electronic devices only have to be turned off on take-off and landing, while in flight you’re generally allowed to use them. My DS, MP3 player, and laptop have all served me very well on long trans-continental flights.
24/04/2010 at 01:10 Yanko says:
Torchlight was a total winner when it did that “netbook mode” – i think it’s a really cool differential for an indie project.
Let me ask you this: do you guys think that it’d be “too cheap” to sell DLC that turned a game into a viable netbook game? As in, you buy the full game and you have the option to buy a content pack that makes it runnable on low end computers. Obviously, it’d cost as much as a small content pack (so an extra question is: if you think that’d be alright, how much would you pay for that?)
24/04/2010 at 01:40 Mario Figueiredo says:
How do you guys manage to play it on a touchpad? I gave up after just a few minutes.
24/04/2010 at 01:12 Devenger says:
Got a netbook (eee 1005P – very good battery life!) a few months ago, and it’s been a joy playing games on it, often to the bemusement of my friends in my school’s sixth form common room. Done a whole lot of dying in Spelunky, a good deal of Audiosurfing, a bite of Deus Ex, as well as various wonderful little things RPS has linked in the past (ROM CHECK FAIL remains my favourite for confusing passers-by).
Currently I’m playing blast-from-the-past Cave Story (very accessible with the wonderful translation pack). The short distance between save-points in the sidescrolling shooter makes it perfect for a 15-minute play during even a bus ride, and the clear and pleasant 8-bit music is great for getting away from the surroundings.
Biggest disappointment? Defcon runs quite slowly. I can’t have an all AI game running at hyperspeed, and pretend I’m running nuclear war simulations. Maybe I should try Uplink for my netbook-Introversion fix…
24/04/2010 at 01:14 Ginger Yellow says:
Here’s what’s on my netbook:
Uplink
World of Goo
Plants vs Zombies
Aquaria
Planescape Torment
Spelunky
Visual Pinball
Various LucasArts adventures
I’ve been trying to get GalCiv 2 on it, but I’m having issues with my Impulse account. Similarly, I’d give Torchlight a go, but I don’t have much disk space left and I can’t imagine it being much fun with a trackpad. I just got MOO 1+2 from GOG and I’m definitely going to be installing that.
24/04/2010 at 01:26 piphil says:
My low-end laptop sports a 1.5 Ghz Celeron with 512 MB RAM and an ancient nVidia mobile graphics card (I think a Geforce 4 MX420 Go). I’m assuming most modern netbooks should be more powerful.
Games I’ve played successfully include Civilization 2, Dungeon Keeper 2, Startopia, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, The Settlers 3, Theme Hospital, Red Alert, and older versions of the Links golf games. The main problem with netbooks is the lack of DVD/CD drive, thus requiring either cracking or an external drive, which somewhat hamstrings the portable nature of the device.
Personally, I’d go for a similarly priced (c. £400) ULV-processor 13-15″ laptop. You wouldn’t get quite the battery life, but a larger screen, better performance and the built-in optical drive would make up for it and allow a far larger number of retro games.
24/04/2010 at 01:52 EthZee says:
Urgh, external disc drives. This laptop apparently was made before they were commonplace, so I generally tend to avoid games which require a disc (unless I can produce a back-up image to work from). Luckily, most games have support for no-cd play.
24/04/2010 at 01:35 Jajusha says:
Do not understimate the 950! I used to run Oblivion (with god know’s what i had to emulate) and i could reach 10fps in a non fight environment.
24/04/2010 at 01:36 Gwyn says:
Don’t forget the Alienware M11x – it’s basically an ugly netbook with a mid-range dx10 nvidia chip for something like £700. It’s out of the netbook price range obviously, but if the intention is portable gaming then it’s unrivalled.
24/04/2010 at 11:42 Alexander Norris says:
It’s unrivalled until a year from now when it’s obsolete and you have a very pretty £700 paperweight.
Gaming laptops are never worth it, ever. Get something small, light and with a good battery life that you can use for other purposes, then see if you can put games on it afterwards.
24/04/2010 at 15:58 sleepygamer says:
I was thinking that. I rather like the m11x, though. You have to shell out a bit extra to make it worth the while, mind you. Knock out that Pentium for a 1.3ghz C2D, drop in 4GB of DDR3 and a 7200rpm HDD (which, frankly, you are better off doing yourself instead of letting Dell handle it for you) and you are flying.
Mind you, those little upgrades knock the price up to £1000 here, and $1000 in the US. And for £1000, you are seriously joking for something like that. I’d pay the $1000 for it, however, if I was in the US. Because they give me a snazzy laser etched nameplate.
I WANT IT.
Aside from that, I rather like Alienware’s bulky styling. The m11x isn’t exactly as vulgar as its bigger brothers, and at least looks a little unique.
The good thing about the m11x is that it’ll probably outlive most gaming laptops by not falling into their traps. Gaming notebooks tend to be heavy, short on battery, massively compromised when it comes to gaming. The m11x isn’t massively heavier than a netbook, can run up to 8 hours (according to Dell) when not gaming, and while it’s not a HD5870, Core i7, 6GB RAM, SSD gaming beast, it can at least hold its own in modern titles. Mass Effect 2 at native res maxed out with over 50fps? Yus please.
I’m pretty certain it would last longer when gaming than my 1st gen PSP, and be less annoying to use too.
24/04/2010 at 20:57 Gwyn says:
I’d disagree with it becoming obsolete, as the comparison we’re making is against other netbooks which aren’t even capable of running HL2 yet, let alone MW2. A gaming laptop with a quad core and SLI graphics will indeed always be a massive waste of money because it’s targeting the highest end, and thus guaranteeing its own obsolescence.
The M11x doesn’t dazzle you with next-gen hi-res shaders – it just plays absolutely every game up to 2009 at above 30fps on the lowest settings, and fits into a rucksack. It can’t actually become obsolete, as it’ll always be good enough for that task. You’ll be waiting a long time for a netbook that performs similarly!
The above is also why there’s no point fussing about the specs either. There’s just no point in upping the CPU speed or RAM because it won’t produce a material difference. Plus, you should avoid overspending on Alienware – they are ugly, ugly creations, and you will be embarrassed.
26/04/2010 at 02:45 RedFred says:
I dropped AU$3000 into a laptop this time last year and it hasn’t really let me down. I was doing alot of travelling and spending alot of time stuck in places with nothing to do.
Now that I am having something that resembles a normal life I use my laptop as a desktop with kb/mouse/monitor/stereo all connected.
Sure it was expensive but at least I could play GTAIV in a hotel room. :D
24/04/2010 at 01:37 boredgamer says:
You could try nVidia ION powered netbooks. They’re actually pretty decent at playing some not-so-demanding modern games (COD4, for reference).
24/04/2010 at 02:02 jvempire says:
You can play Torchlight really well with a low-res texture mod.
24/04/2010 at 02:03 Rohit says:
Disappointed that my Asus 1000HE can barely run Half-Life.
24/04/2010 at 02:07 Nick says:
Emulation of classic snes and megadrive games!
Which you of course own the originals of.
Yes.
24/04/2010 at 02:13 Vinraith says:
Further proving that many, though by no means all, of the neat gaming things you can do on a netbook you can also do on a DS with a flashcart.
24/04/2010 at 02:21 Nick says:
Ok then. GBA roms.
HAH!
24/04/2010 at 02:23 Vinraith says:
@Nick
OK, a flashcart and a memory adapter (barring the newer DSi and DSiXL models, which actually can’t emulate GBA games, which in turn is reason enough not to upgrade IMO).
24/04/2010 at 02:26 Psychopomp says:
What Nick said!
It’s always a good time for Chrono Trigger
24/04/2010 at 02:57 Radiant says:
I don’t get chrono trigger at /all/.
I mean it’s wonderfully made but I have no idea who is what and what the hell is happening anymore it’s so dense and complex.
Also if you’re playing mega drive games then PLEASE get “Best Of The Best”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph7rUqqkQ4c
It was called Panzer Kickboxing on the amiga and is AWESOME.
24/04/2010 at 11:43 Alexander Norris says:
@Vinraith: some of the newer carts are coming out bundled with a GBA-slot RAM expansion that allows the flashcart to run a GBA emulator, too.
Flashcarts are awesome.
24/04/2010 at 13:45 Wisq says:
Radiant:
Panzer Kickboxing? YOU LIE.
I wanted fighting WW2 tanks, damnit.
24/04/2010 at 02:41 LionsPhil says:
Working fine on my EeePC 701—that’s the original one, so 800×480—running Win2K. Notable 3D successes:
Unreal Tournament: GOTY — runs great, small notebook mouse can be helpful but some maps are sufficiently quiet in the Z axis to wind the bots down and play it DOOM-style.
1NSANE — also runs great; there may be an issue with the main menu being rotated ninetey degrees, but the game proper is fine
Spelunky — categorising this under “3D” because the damn thing does its upscaling via a shader (and thus also sucks battery, and has the odd performance dip). Goddamnit, people. This doesn’t actually run on my trusty non-gaming desktop with its GeForce 4Ti.
Some others I can’t remember right now.
And bunches of plain 2D stuff, like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Alpha Centauri (vertical scrolling required, but then I have a piddly resolution), OpenTTD, Fallout, Starcraft, ScummVM…
Seriously, though, UT99. Hell, that runs playable on my Celery 500 with no 3D accelleration. Thing’s scalable.
24/04/2010 at 02:57 LionsPhil says:
Oh, and you can get a whacking great (third party) battery for the 7xx series which sticks out from the bottom a little, providing an excellent prop to correct the keyboard angle, a nice grip (the battery clamping design provides enough physical contact that I can trust this), and enough battery life to play away for hours, even with the GPU supping at the electron pool. Yeeesssss.
There’s no point having mobile gaming that runs flat an hour into your flight, after all.
24/04/2010 at 20:42 Smeghammer says:
I’ve had luck with my 7 series Eee as well. I upgraded the ram to 2 gigs and clocked the cpu to 900mhz. With this setup the battery runs dry faster, but if you disable the webcam in the bios it pretty much evens out.
I can successfully run anything q3 era and back at at least 30fps with some heavy config tweaking. Emulators work flawlessly up to the psx era. I can get 60 FPS out of Guilty Gear XX#Reload. There’s something special about being able to play NOLF on the go.
24/04/2010 at 02:52 M.P. says:
I was gonna get a Skulltrail-based netbook too, but then I decided to spend a little bit more and get an Acer Ferrari instead. Still netbook-form factor (11.6″) and price range (a tad over £300), but it has a dual core AMD cpu and a discrete Nvidia gpu, so the idea was I would get to do some proper 3D gaming on it.
In the 2 months since I got it, the only games I played on it were Time, Gentlemen, Please, Audiosurf, some old games on DOSbox and Solium Infernum, all of which would’ve run just fine on the GMA950… So yeah, that Nvidia chip is tapping its foot impatiently waiting for me to throw it something to chew at, but to no avail. :)
24/04/2010 at 03:01 glassjoe says:
I betcha ReVolt would work pretty good on many of these. Seriously, prob the most fun racing game ever
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/908/Re-Volt.html
24/04/2010 at 03:02 Tei says:
Nexuiz, Tremulous.. some FPS’s will work there. But I think on a netbook is better to use games that ask for very limited interaction, like roguelikes.
24/04/2010 at 03:20 Schyz says:
Playable on my Aspire One (1,5GB RAM):
Freelancer
Infinity Engine (Planescape Troment, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale)
Fallout 1+2
Arcanum
Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
Anachronox
Gothic
Outcast
Half-Life 1.6 engine (Team Fortress, CS)
Silent Storm + Sentinels
Combat Mission BO, AK
Black & White
Splinter Cell
Mafia
GTA 3, Vice City
Morrowind
Operation Flashpoint
24/04/2010 at 03:23 captain fitz says:
Anything from GOG. Doesn’t require a CD drive and 90% of their catalogue runs on full setting on a netbook.
24/04/2010 at 03:30 nille says:
Has anyone tried “Iji” (by Daniel Remar) on a netbook? ..one of my favourite games.
24/04/2010 at 18:38 Grunt says:
I love Iji. Would be great to have that running on my N110. :)
24/04/2010 at 03:41 Fatrat says:
I’ve got the Asus 1005P, N450 1.66Ghz CPU and 3150 Intel graphics. I have to say i’m really chuffed as it runs stuff practically as good as my bulky Acer laptop (only a year old) would, really.
I too managed to get WoW running on it as did Alec, though i haven’t played WoW in aaaages, i was just testing its limits.
When i do game on it i tend to play older/less demanding titles on it, which all run perfectly on my Win 7 Pro setup, such as:
Jagged Alliance 2
Hitman – Codename 47
Osmos
Constructor
Age of Empires series
Theme Hospital
World of Goo
Postal
I’m sure it could run quite a lot of less intense 3D titles at a decent rate, i just haven’t tried it out as i bought my netbook mainly for university, not gaming. It certainly copes with that task just fine though, as good as my mid-range laptop from 2008 did.
Honestly, netbooks are great little things and the battery life is fantastic at least in mine (9-11 hours, easily 6-7+ while gaming/movie watching).
Get a wireless mouse and you’re ready to rock. I recommend the Logitech M505 for its long battery life and *TINY* dongle.
24/04/2010 at 03:47 Fatrat says:
Oh and i’d like to add, if manufacturers can sort out a GOOD integrated graphics chip some day soon, i think netbooks could start to gain even more popularity as portable gaming devices. Easily. Once people can play more popular titles such as TF2 on them, off we go. IMO.
24/04/2010 at 03:44 wcaypahwat says:
Well, here’s a list of all the games I have installed on my Acer Aspire One:
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic
Alien Assault
American McGee’s Alice
Black and White
Command & conquer (Red Alert 1&2&yuri’s revenge, TibSun)
Crimson Skies
Defcon
Doom 1 &2
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2
Icewind Dale 1 & 2
Planscape: Torment
Fallout 1 & 2
Freelancer
HoMM3
Hostile Waters: Anteus Rising
MechCommander 2
Mechwarrior 3
Metal Fatigue
Nocturne
Peggle
Plants v Zombies
Ricochet Infinity
Serious Sam
Shogo
Starship troopers (The old squad based rts type one)
System Shock 2
UT99
Uplink
They all run fine, with pretty much no hiccups at all.
24/04/2010 at 03:52 Sev says:
Sleep is Death, I think, is probably the best ultra-low spec game of all time. And considering how ludicrously cheap Deus Ex is on Steam right now, that would be incredible as well.
24/04/2010 at 03:58 malkav11 says:
I honestly haven’t fiddled much with games on my netbook. My principle was that it didn’t matter if I could game on it as long as I could do non-gaming PC stuff with it, and it does all that. If I must game on the go, I have handhelds. My netbook is for portable computing. And my desktop is for full bells-and-whistles PC gaming.
24/04/2010 at 04:48 Nelson says:
For those mentioning dwarf fortress, there’s a program called dfterm that lets you host a game on your home computer. Then, as long as your netbook has an internet connection and a telnet client you can log into your game and play. It will run as fast as your home computer could run it but use practically no resources on the netbook. There are even fonts made for it based on tilesets.
26/04/2010 at 19:30 disperse says:
dfterm sounds awesome.
It could make running community fortresses trivial as well.
24/04/2010 at 05:06 bill says:
GOG GOG GOG….
A pretty fair number of the people buying games on GOG seem to be on netbooks, and they have a compatibility thread in their forum if you want to see what’s good.
I really want to get a netbook… my laptop is too darn big to actually move. So it’s essentially just a really un-ergonomic desktop. Great for moving house and saving space though.
24/04/2010 at 16:57 Wulf says:
What kind of laptop do you use? I have a Dell Vostro and I lug it around with me all the time, it’s really not at all heavy and in a carry case it fits nicely under my arm.
24/04/2010 at 05:09 bill says:
PS/ I thing the intel GMA chips get too much stick. For a netbook / integrated graphics solution they actually have a surprising amount of power. The old GMA cards were terrible, but some of the newer ones can manage reasonable (if not cutting edge) 3d graphics pretty well. And on small netbooks while on the train you can often turn off a lot of the bells and whistles and get even recent games running surprisingly smoothly.
24/04/2010 at 14:07 LionsPhil says:
Yeah, and they’re improving at a steady rate. If they’re not careful, nVidia and ATi are going to find themselves marginalised to the “hardcore PC gamer” end of the spectrum, and that doesn’t seem to be a good place to be right now. Probably why ION exists.
24/04/2010 at 05:13 Wisq says:
X-COM, totally. Really, anything DOSbox-based.
Also, “Ben There, Dan That”, etc.
I find the biggest problem for most games is actually the lack of a mouse, though. The touchpad just doesn’t cut it for me when you’re doing a ton of pointy-clicky, even in something like X-COM where you have a lot of time to do it in.
Note that, for those of you who run Linux at home, Dwarf Fortress can now be run in plain ncurses mode there, letting you play it remotely without any sort of external program, aside from a typical SSH client. Though I’m sure you get more flexibility and possibly reduced bandwidth from things like dfterm (which I didn’t know about and shall have to try, thanks Nelson).
24/04/2010 at 05:26 Iain says:
My laptop plays TF2 with an integrated graphics card full specs suck it
24/04/2010 at 05:55 Torbjorn says:
Theres a booster your can get for GMAs. Its on the interwebs somewhere.
I’ve mostly played what everyone else here has but I’m going to add:
Torchlight – Yea the booster plus low rez helps
Warcraft 3 – runs perfect
Starcraft
Diablo 2
Halflife
D&D Online
24/04/2010 at 06:15 artofwot says:
I’m stuck on a very old, very crappy laptop that uses Intel Extreme Graphics 2.
Hint: Extreme is a lie. But I’ve managed to run and enjoy the following:
Diablo I + II
Age of Empires I + II
Fallout I + II + Tactics
Sacred
Sacrifice
Giants
Civilization III
Command and Conquer (And Red Alert I + II)
Half-Life (and expansions, although I did get occasionally frame rate dips)
I generally try and avoid anything 3D. I’ve been kind of tempted to give Morrowind a go, but I’m unwilling to risk the resulting explosion that might occur. Audiosurf was a no-no, and I was barely able to get to the menu. Torchlight ran OK running around the city, but when entering the dungeons it started to crawl (no pun intended). I suppose I should probably give the low texture resolution mod a go. I’m just a little afraid my life will disappear.
But, thankfully I’ll be returning to my gaming PC once school ends.
24/04/2010 at 12:33 Tei says:
“Torchlight ran OK running around the city, but when entering the dungeons it started to crawl”
Tee heee….
24/04/2010 at 06:26 Hyperion says:
I think it’s possible to play Oblivion on netbooks. I’ve never tried it but they say it works on them using this setup.
http://www.oldblivion.com/index.php
24/04/2010 at 06:47 Dave says:
Plants vs. Zombies runs well enough on my netbook. Torchlight almost does.
24/04/2010 at 07:58 Riesenmaulhai says:
Apart from the fact that it weighs as much as two _real_ netbooks.
24/04/2010 at 08:02 jon_hill987 says:
I really struggle due to my netbook running Ubuntu and having a solid state hard drive (that is very slow). World of Goo and OpenTTD nativve Linux versions work fine though, and if I had a mouse Quake 3 and Warsow would be playable. Due to Adobe’s poor Linux support flash games are out of the question (it struggles with a youtube vid in the browser, VLC plays them fine) and Popcap games run slowly in WINE.
24/04/2010 at 08:14 Riesenmaulhai says:
…which was a reply to the guy who promoted the Alienware M11x as an alternative.
24/04/2010 at 08:25 RogB says:
i’ll just echo the comments above (turn based = good)
eee 701 winXP (800*480) – the res hamstrings this one more than anything else.
my stuff:
Exult (ultima 7) – the old faithful
Pentagram (ultima 8)
Deus Ex
Jagged Alliance 2
X-COM/UFO
Albion (dosbox)
Master of Magic (dosbox)
Battle isle 2 (dosbox)
OpenTTD
a couple of classic emulated games, gunstar heroes (MD) Secret of Mana (SNES)
music stuff :
Sunvox
Milkytracker
AXSwin
Musagi
24/04/2010 at 08:30 TheApologist says:
I spent a very enjoyable long weekend at my PC-impaired mum’s playing fallout 2 from GOG.
Many train journey’s from for work playing Plants vs Zombies which ran well for me.
And I’m just about to move Planescape over. B-e-a-utiful
24/04/2010 at 08:31 Player1 says:
SHOGO!!! One of the best and most underrated FPS ever! It’s in my top 3 favorite games of all time and i still have it installed.
24/04/2010 at 08:39 Mac says:
Torchlight, World of Goo, Planescape Torment and Crayon Physics give me something to do on those boring nights in a strange hotel.
Get Torchleech too for Torchlight – manages mods …
24/04/2010 at 08:40 Mac says:
Anyone tried HOMM 5? Does it run?
24/04/2010 at 08:42 Peter Radiator Full Pig says:
Please make a post on how to make a PC that runs current games for 300…
That was the most interesting part of this article.
On a netbook, neptunes pride would run.
Also, it love to see a list of curent enough/fun games that dont require 3d accleration, though any of these games are like that, i doubt its all.
24/04/2010 at 08:53 deimos says:
DwarfFortress
Baldur’s Gate/Icewind Dale Games
Torchlight
Crimson Skies (and a old joystick)
Diablo series
Starcraft
Fallout
Mechcommander
Quake
and some old DOS games via dosbox.
24/04/2010 at 09:06 Stompywitch says:
I just want to know what the game in the article picture is :)
I don’t really use my netbook for gaming, so it just has Alien Assault and Desktop Dungeons on it. But I’ve NEVER EVER missed my bus stop through playing DD. Right?
24/04/2010 at 11:45 Alexander Norris says:
Fairly certain it’s Dofus.
24/04/2010 at 09:16 Sledge says:
EEE701 (Celeron 600MHz, 2GB RAM, 16GB SDHC card used as HDD) – Starctaft, OpenTTD, Need for Speed 3 (High Stakes) and Need for Speed 5 (Porsche, probably the best game in the whole series), ScummVM fo classic adventure games like Monkey Island or Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, bunch of emulators (GENS, SNES95 … ), DosBOX for Warlords 2 DeLuxe and StarControl 2 etc etc :) Netbooks may be underpowered for news games, but will bring you back to good old ones :)
24/04/2010 at 09:22 Dan(WR) says:
I’ve had my NC10 for almost a year. It’s great for train commuters like myself, and it’s fine for gaming as long as you recognise its limitations – the main one being the tiny touchpad.
I’ve played
Sam and Max (the original)
Day of the Tentacle
Disciples 2
Dungeon Master (the Return to Chaos version)
Age of Wonders 2
Battle for Wesnoth
Master of Magic
Zangband
Plants vs Zombies (I had to give up on this as the touchpad makes the whack-a-zombie levels nightmarish)
Peggle
Spelunky
Lumines
World of Goo
Starcraft (The touchpad is arse for RTS games – but old RTS games have game speed sliders)
I was bemused by the Gadget Show the other night, where Bentley compared the iPad to a netbook and bemoaned the netbook’s lack of games…
24/04/2010 at 09:29 Alexander Norris says:
I have a related other question: Windows 7 Starter is rubbish at making use of that microscopic screen space (1020*600 is tiny, really), so I’ll be putting Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my netbook.
The question becomes, what old games will run on a netbook running Linux, preferably natively but I guess if a netbook can handle Wine, emulated reasonably well?
24/04/2010 at 10:22 jon_hill987 says:
Look up the page at my last post. WINE is not that good, the few games that have native version work OK though.
24/04/2010 at 09:38 Sucram says:
GF has a CULV laptop which is a little faster than a netbook. She’s not a big gamer and mainly plays web games. so far she likes:
Popcap Games (Mainly Zuma’s Revenge and Peggle)
Jooleem
And over LAN:
Wormux
Armagedtron
Galcon Fusion
Also tried Soldat, Trackmanina, Defcon and a Tetris clone over LAN but she wasn’t sold. do wish Popcap would make their games multiplayer.
24/04/2010 at 09:46 Itch says:
Braid chugs a little, but is still very playable on my Acer.
24/04/2010 at 10:08 RogB says:
I forgot ‘strange adventures in infinite space’, nice quick to play spacey randomly generated game. (terrible description)
24/04/2010 at 11:12 Will says:
spacey randomly generated game sums it up well I think (other game taht sits there, god the time i wasted playing that when i got that thing for ‘work’)
24/04/2010 at 10:09 DrGonzo says:
I think you mean the Hp Compaq mini 311. Thats what I’m looking at getting soon. Saw it going for £250 a few weeks back.
24/04/2010 at 10:10 DrGonzo says:
Argh that was @CaptainHairy
24/04/2010 at 20:24 CaptainHairy says:
I keep searching for the thing as a Dell, and keep getting reminded that it’s an HP machine. Seriously, why can I not remember that?
24/04/2010 at 10:34 Ed says:
I’m kind of torn between a £300 laptop and a £300 note/netbook.
Any other developers out there got any experience using a notebook as a primary work PC? (I’m imagining with a USB mouse and keyboard)
24/04/2010 at 10:57 bookwormat says:
I’m not sure what platform tools you use, or what specs the more recent netbook models have, but my dell mini 9 (running ubuntu 10.4 NBR) is definitely not a development machine.
Beside an external keyboard I would also recommend an external display. And it’s pretty annoying to work on a machine running on a single processor, and with less than 3GB RAM..
For example, stuff like J2EE development with Maven/Eclipse is more or less out of the question. Light stuff with C/Python on Emacs will work, but still not make you very happy.
24/04/2010 at 11:19 Will says:
Windows 7 has some really good built in synchronisation tools, so I run it on my main machine and my Eeee 1005HA. All my project folders get mirrored automatically, so in a spare moment I figured hey, why not fire up an IDE?
It actually works 1000 times better than expected, of course multiply a small enough number by a big one and you still get not great. The main issue is really screen space – having all the debug panes open as well as inspection tools leaves a tiny tiny space for the code window :-) The 1005HA has a really good keyboard, with no finger acrobatics required to get to symbols. Home and end are a little annoying, but usable.
For big projects, don’t do it man. 1.6GHz, and a single core, that’s going to hurt. The atom processors are actually misleading in terms of speed – they don’t implement all the CISC instructions in hardware so they’re really only as fast as the 900MHz Celerons. Hyperthreading makes it worse, as two logical cores divides that performance up.
For games? Man! Indie buffet! Read this site for long enough and there’ll be low-spec 20-minute/hour delights galore for you to play!
24/04/2010 at 14:13 LionsPhil says:
I hack about with Dev-C++ on my EeePC; can get readable 80-column text out of it.
I suspect your main problem, since you’ve worked around all the others with external peripherables, would be slow compile jobs for nontrivial builds. And forget about ever running anything under valgrind or a profiler and having it finish this side of the heat death of the Universe.
25/04/2010 at 12:24 dogsolitude_uk says:
Working with Visual Studio is OK, I think the biggest problem you’ll have developing on a netbook is screen space for the different windows used in dev apps.
In VS I had the toolbox narrowed on the left, debug on the bottom, got rid of the properties window in the bottom right and managed to get a reasonable amount of coding space. It makes life easier if you handcode stuff rather than use the drag’n'drop (really, it makes sense to handocde things anyway as you probably already know)
Flash can be painful with the timeline, library, stage, properties and actionscript windows all crying out for space.
Photoshop was fine, just don’t have too many windows open. As I was using it for making banners and buttons at the time, it was no real problem.
Investing in a little USB mouse really helps. In general though, if you’re doing some coding in Notepad++ for a website or doing some .NET stuff, doing it on a netbook is no real problem in terms of speed, though if you’re searching for prime numbers or computing PI to a trillion decimal places you’ll probably want to put it in the freezer.
Filezilla worked OK too, as did Netbeans.
Memory’s the important thing, clear the crap out, keep an eye on your background processes, save regularly, and you can always go to a desktop if you’re doing any big graphic work.
Netbooks are great little things!
24/04/2010 at 11:09 CMaster says:
As an aside to the games that do work on GMA graphics – if you are thinking about gaming (and hi-res movies) on a netbook, perhaps it is worth looking out for an nVidia Ion based netbook? It’s no powerhouse, but the graphics on the Ion board are a hell of a lot more than the normal Intel ones.
24/04/2010 at 11:11 Will says:
Space Rangers & Baldurs Gate 2 sit permanently on my laptop (though it struggles with the 3D rendering of the ground battles for SR). And emulators.
24/04/2010 at 11:28 Doctor Doc says:
Farmville is actually one of the most CPU intensive games in existence. It’s up there with TF2 and Crysis. No kidding.
24/04/2010 at 14:22 Daniel Klein says:
But is it a game?
24/04/2010 at 12:05 Ian says:
I picked up a tiny travel mouse for a few quid and it opens up the netbook gaming world to new levels – it’s easy to use a leg as a mousemat, so there’s no space issues too.
I tend to blitz Plants vs Zombies, KOTOR, Morrowind, Fallout, Planescape Torment, Alpha Centauri, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, Peggle, X-Com, Deus Ex and countless others I can’t even think of on the old NC10. It’s made my regular 10+ hours of trains per week a hell of a lot easier and more fun.
Plus there’s watching movies on it, listening to music and the fact that – if you must – you can even do work. Ah, one of the finest investments I’ve made, I think.
24/04/2010 at 20:27 CaptainHairy says:
Travel mice are fantastic. I got one with a retractable cable, and it has basically meant I can actually play FPS games on the move. Super useful, and it only cost me £5.
24/04/2010 at 12:17 Quentillius says:
Dell XPS M1730,
So TF2 at highest settings, etc…
24/04/2010 at 13:54 Wisq says:
… and not a netbook.
Please, everyone, let’s get our terminology correct here. It’s all fantastic that a lot of you have laptops with either integrated or discrete video cards that can play games like a good desktop computer from just a couple years ago. But we’re not talking about those.
We’re talking about the little $300 things that have a 10″ screen or less, typically no CD/DVD drive, sometimes not even a hard drive (or at least, solid-state memory instead of spinning platters), cheap cheap integrated graphics, and typically a somewhat underpowered CPU.
“Netbook” is not just a typo for “notebook” …
24/04/2010 at 12:21 MinisterofDOOM says:
Processing power is a crutch for netbooks, sure. But a much more serious issue is the lack of an optical drive, which introduces all sorts of problems when trying to run older games. Which is a shame, as netbooks are ideal portable legacy gaming machines otherwise.
I don’t have a netbook, but I do have an old business-class laptop (read: very little memory, very basic graphics hardware) that I use to play my older games that aren’t widescreen- or Windows 7-friendly. It makes netbooks look like supercomputers, but at least it has a CDROM drive. Too many games require a disc in the drive, not to mention needing somewhere to put the install discs for games I didn’t buy digitally (you know…all my old games that will actually run on a netbook).
Overall, I’d say a cyborg shoulder is a much better solution to your case of Old Man Shoulder than a netbook.
24/04/2010 at 12:40 Will Tomas says:
Currently on my Dell Mini 9 I have been able to happily run:
Baldur’s Gate 2 (+expansion)
Crayon Physics Deluxe
FreeCiv/FreeCol
Spelunky
Half-Life
Opposing Force
Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (doesn’t display the menu picture but otherwise works perfectly)
Age of Empires 2
Freelancer
Peggle Nights
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Sins of a Solar Empire (with all graphics options on Low it runs absolutely smoothly, needs a fan patch to do the screen resolution but that’s easy to get)
Torchlight (gets choppy with lots of characters onscreen but is definitely playable)
World of Goo
Aliens vs Predator Classic 2000
X-COM: UFO Defense
Freedom Force
The Dig
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Trials 2
Fallout 1 (although oddly I got slowdown with the widescreen mod)
Morrowind
Zombie Driver
Emulators for various old consoles.
If anyone’s at all wondering about how far this sort of spec netbook can go, basically most things that can run on a low-end PIV with 64MB graphical RAM (basic RAM won’t be a problem) is absolutely fine – a GeForce 2 equivalent card.
Although a few things haven’t worked that seemed okay on spec – 18 Wheels of Steel – America had a frame rate far too low to be acceptable yet was entirely within spec. My advice on netbook gaming though is that it can deal with a lot more than you think, and there’s hours of fun to be had, especially if you have lots of older games you missed out on first time round (for me Freedom Force, XCOM, AvP, AE2 and BG2 definitely fit within that).
24/04/2010 at 13:52 Will Tomas says:
Forgot to add the marvellous Cave Story, OpenTTD and Shogun: Total War to that. Medieval 1 should work fine as well.
24/04/2010 at 12:50 Britpunk says:
I’m currently relying on my netbook as my sole gaming device, which totally sucks!
Having said that, I’ve just played through Thief 3 in its entirety. Even with a tiny screen, tinny sound and horrible textures, The Cradle remains utterly terrifying.
Other games I’m playing a lot: Railroad Tycoon 3, Uplink, VVVVVV, Xcom series, Planescape, Freedom Force, Fallout 1/2, Defcon. I’ve bought the Commandos series in a Steam deal a couple of weeks ago and plan to tackle those next. With tweaking, Football Manager works, but is painfully slow. Biggest annoyance is the lack of optical drive meaning legitimate disc-checking is out of the question without an external.
24/04/2010 at 13:28 Inigo says:
I have one of the early 701 eeePcs.
I’d LIKE to be able to play something on it, but it tends to overheat and crash before I ca…..
26/04/2010 at 19:33 disperse says:
@Inigo
This is funny, but you should have left off the “….” ;-)
24/04/2010 at 13:31 Czechton says:
If you set the pop cap low (to around 30) and do a nano fortress using embark anywhere, I think the game would run pretty smoothly.
24/04/2010 at 13:55 Czechton says:
that was supposed to be at the guys saying DF wouldnt run well.
24/04/2010 at 13:42 Po0py says:
Pretty much anything on GOG.com would work fine.
24/04/2010 at 13:48 Easydog says:
Just picked up ‘Planescape: Torment’, ‘Arcanum’ and ‘Jagged Alliance 2′.
Frankly I find there’s still a lot of life left in the old games especially now they’re portable :)
24/04/2010 at 14:09 Burny says:
For heavily Mouse-based games I strongly recommend the Logitech VX Nano Wireless Mouse. It runs for ages with one set of batteries.
Serves me extremely well with my Eee PC 1000H.
24/04/2010 at 14:19 DXN says:
Unreal Tournament 1999! That’ll run on a small pile of magnetized paperclips hooked up to a flashlight.
24/04/2010 at 14:21 SomeGuy says:
I can sorta run frozen synapse on my laptop (which wont run on my nice powerfull PC gue to my open GL being stuck on 1.2.(help plz))
24/04/2010 at 14:23 Daniel Klein says:
If you like shooting things until the ground literally changes colour, Crimsonland should work just fine on a netbook. It’s addictive like hell, too.
24/04/2010 at 14:28 RiptoR says:
I recently got an Asus 1201N (dual core atom with ION) and it plays games surprisingly well, even newer games run pretty good once you turn down most of the fancy graphics stuff.
It also gave me the opportunity to replay some of the older games in my large collection, reliving some of the best memories I have in gaming.
24/04/2010 at 14:34 The Snee says:
A few of us often get together with netbooks and laptops and play some Warzone 2100, which is now available free as a open source project. Dungeon Keeper 2 works quite well too. Xcom is the one that gets played the most though.
24/04/2010 at 15:25 redpandaredpanda says:
I can’t even run DF on my not-netbook-full-lapton! The game makes the laptop so hot that it turns off after ten minutes of dwarfiness
24/04/2010 at 15:46 Bob says:
What game is that in the picture?
24/04/2010 at 16:33 RiptoR says:
If I’m not mistaken, that would be the browser MMO Dofus.
24/04/2010 at 15:47 Tei says:
Maximizing framerate on DF2010:
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Maximizing_framerate
* Using Baughn’s Accelerator program. This was written for the old 40d stuff before most of the recent graphics updates. It is generally reported to increase performance in both windows and WINE emulated DF games, though there have been some reports of a blue tinge and instability arising from the accelerator. See the Bay12 thread here. Please note that this is intended solely as a stopgap until the 40d-graphics merge, so if it doesn’t work, don’t use it. Baughn has stated that he will not devote time to bugtesting it.
* Changing [PARTIAL_PRINT:NO:2] to [PARTIAL_PRINT:YES:2] often dramatically improves performance.
* Disabling TEMPERATURE and WEATHER in the init file has been shown to increase speed.
* Limiting the number of dwarves and other moving units (cage/butcher animals!) greatly helps keep speed up.
* World size and fortress site size increase RAM usage and decrease speed. Check if you are happier with an embark rectangle of 3×3 and a medium or small world.
—
I was able to play in a EEPC701 with these settings to a medium size fortres with 70 dwarfs, so you must be able too :-)
24/04/2010 at 16:34 Ravenger says:
I’ve got Steam installed on my Asus EEE 1000H netbook, and these game work well:
Half-Life 1 (not source)
Freedom Force
Alien vs Predator 2000
Peggle.
Also the netbook makes an excellent emulator machine and runs Mame and other emulators amazingly well. Most games run at full speed.
My favourite is running WinUAE because the form factor of a PC is very similar to an Amiga, so it’s like having a portable Amiga. In fact it feels like using a real Amiga.
24/04/2010 at 17:07 Dreamhacker says:
My big dream is to one day be able to afford a gaming laptop capable of playing games at least from 2007…
24/04/2010 at 17:15 Hugh says:
Brilliant timing RPS, as it’s my birthday on monday and i’m getting a laptop!
24/04/2010 at 17:16 Blargh says:
“Every other game I wanted to play and show off the new pc graphics on was a bloody xbox port that looked EXACTLY the same as the xbox version [Assassins Creed 2 I'm looking at you].”
Resolution and AA still make a huge difference, so even a straight port will look way better. Games looks miles better on my PC than they do on my 360, and they’re hooked up to the same monitor so it’s pretty easy to see the vast difference. Oh, and they run much better, too! ;)
24/04/2010 at 17:19 Blargh says:
Stupid reply system! >(
24/04/2010 at 17:24 PiMan says:
My HP mini has no problem at all with WoW – it actually runs it rather better than my big Dell laptop. But it takes about 10 minutes to start any of the new Monkey Island episodes. Haven’t tried running any other Steam stuff yet, so I don’t know if it’s Steam or Telltale causing the problem.
24/04/2010 at 17:41 wcaypahwat says:
Halo works fine. The first level does anyway. I got bored and didn’t play any further.
24/04/2010 at 18:45 RLacey says:
I ended up taking a netbook with me to Australia last year, and spent my time playing Guild Wars (friend’s net connection) and No One Lives Forever.
Guild Wars is okay if you don’t mind a bit of stuttering.
No One Lives Forever is as smooth as butter.
24/04/2010 at 18:58 Iain says:
I’ve been gaming quite happily on my Samsung NC10 for quite a while now, and it runs quite a few things from Steam surprising well, including:
Audiosurf
Beyond Good and Evil
Delta Force 1 & 2
Deus Ex
GTA: Vice City
Half Life 1 + expansions
Max Payne
Osmos
Peggle
Plants vs. Zombies
Star Wars: Dark Forces 1 & 2
Star Wars: Republic Commando (gets a bit sluggish when it gets busy)
Star Wars: KotOR (a bit choppy, but playable)
Torchlight (though as stated upthread it’s borderline playable, even in netbook mode)
Trials 2: SE
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (just about playable a minimum settings)
UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-Com: TFTD
I’ve also had Sins of a Solar Empire running on it – though you have to do a hack to get over the slight problem of the screen not being big enough in height for the minimum resolution.
I think that’s more than enough to keep most gamers busy for quite a while…
24/04/2010 at 19:20 Cooper says:
It’s good to see this has got a lot of responses – it’d be nice to see upcoming games which /could/ run on netbooks take note and jig them so they do
(Those who have larger-than-netbook minimum resolutions and those who are 2D but ‘require’ shader effects, I’m looking at you)
As for me, I’m in Kiev for six months on fieldwork from next week with only my Samsung NC10. I’ve got a bunch of games lined up.
Baldur’s Gate 1/2
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Half Life
Dungeon Keeper
XCom
AvP
Longest Journey
Max Payne
Civ III
Commandos
(plus a bunch of other GoG/ Cheap steam re-releases of old classics)
As for more recent releases:
Spore (seems to scale very surprisingly well)
Spelunky
Anything by PopCap
24/04/2010 at 19:44 Bobic says:
I notice the top high score in flotilla belongs to “Ender”
24/04/2010 at 20:24 Azazel says:
I installed Oasis on my work laptop to keep me occupied during a long stint in hotel rooms. That’s a moreish game.
24/04/2010 at 20:58 A-Scale says:
You might want to check out the thread in the forums here on this subject…
Just kidding.
25/04/2010 at 05:54 Raptor says:
I want to add that Age of Empire 3 works perfect in a Acer One, by removing the water effect.
25/04/2010 at 12:03 dogsolitude_uk says:
I had an old 900mhz Sony Vaio TR1MP until it died on me recently. It ran stuff like Morrowind and Deus Ex fine, but the ergonomics of playing Firts Person stuff on a small laptop really peed me off, so I started playing things like Defcon, Uplink and anything with a ‘flat’ interface.
Chessmaster: Art of Learning came out top, using a 2D board, in terms of playing depth and usability (I cannot recommend it enough – no disc required or net connection and plenty of tutorials), but stuff like CIV III, the two Introversion titles I just mentioned, Braid, VVVVV were great too.
Neverwinter Nights was cool, but the version I had required an Internet Connection to Bioware’s f***ing servers before starting so I gave up on that (is there a patch that removes this?)
For the record I also managed to make good use of Photoshop CS3, Orion (music production stuff), Netbeans and Visual Studio. Fruityloops (more music software) was hopeless and kept crackling/stuttering.
If you’re careful enough to clean out the crapware that comes with these little machines, you could have a very useful device for bothe gaming and being reasonably productive too!
I love netbooks… My TR1MP died over Christmas (HD failure and battery dead), so have not had a chance to really test it out with stuff like Toki Tori, but I may invest in another netboook at some point.
25/04/2010 at 14:20 Axess Denyd says:
Civ33 can’t be made to work at 1024×600 though. (lowest is 1024×768), so that means vertical scrolling, which I cannot stand. Try FreeCiv instead.
25/04/2010 at 14:31 Barts says:
Sorry to jump a bit late to the netbook wagon (and with a shameless plug, too), but I did test my Acer Aspire One for some older gaming quite some time ago and here you can read and watch it:
http://www.bartsnews.net/2009/03/gaming-on-acer-aspire-one.html
25/04/2010 at 20:37 Zanchito says:
Also, I recommend the ancient, but lovely King of Dragon Pass, a great fantasy tribe simulator (turn-based) using the RuneQuest mythos which has absolutely delicious art and a great, great personality.
26/04/2010 at 12:56 Gareth says:
I recently entered the netbook world with an Asus EeePC 1201n. It has a bit more oomph than the average netbook and so far I’ve managed to get Stalker (SOC) running on it with static lighting and max details/res.
I wouldn’t play that game on the road though. I think its hard to get immersed when you’re travelling and I play those type of games to be immersed. So far I’ve enjoyed Desktop Dungeons, Slay (thanks to your article!), Spelunky, Civ 4 and a bit of Dwarf Fortress, but that does run a bit slow and heats the cpu up enough to make me paranoid and turn it off.
Also I should mention that the 1201n’s battery is rubbish so anything that taxes the cpu a lot is going to give you about 2 and a half hours usage. Not ideal but I’m usually not too far away from a plug socket.
26/04/2010 at 13:12 l1ddl3monkey says:
Best game I’ve played using a netbook is frisbee.
26/04/2010 at 15:16 Lydia Greyrose says:
Wizard101 runs quite well on a netbook!
Internet: Internet Connection Required
Operating System: Windows 98SE or later versions
Processor: 1GHz Intel Processor
RAM Space: 512 Megabytes
Video Card: Best results with GeForce 2 or equivalent
(standard in most PCs)
Disk Space: 5 Gigabytes
26/04/2010 at 16:17 DaveyJones says:
I installed hacked graphics drivers on mine, just so I could change the resolution to 1024×768 to play Solium Infernum. Oh, and I’ve been playing a ton of Guilty Gear X2, Morrowind, Spelunky, XIII, Defcon, Mount & Blade, Tropico, Fallout 2, and an indie game called Notrium, which I highly recommend.
26/04/2010 at 20:06 -F. says:
My Samsung Q1up ultra premium (upgraded to 2gb ram) has a touchscreen and an analog joystick for mouse, making it great for both rpg’s and shooters.
I mainly play:
> System Shock (With the mouselook mod)
> Jagged Alliance 2
> Frozen Synapse (great!)
> Arcanum
> Planescape Torment
> No-one Lives Forever
And a on-and-off selection of random gog.com games..
27/04/2010 at 01:49 John says:
Ultima online
X-com
corridor 7
bards tale
Nethack
Asus eee pc 2g surf (pretty much the crappest one that exists)
Its amazing how much fun you could have on a Netbook
18/06/2010 at 15:57 Tim says:
I use my ASUS N10-J to play Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR I & II) for which it’s brilliant. Runs fine even on 4xAA.
Will upgrade to MX11 or equivalent at a later date in a year’s time, once the prices have dropped a bit.
01/10/2010 at 12:37 Lionel says:
Some awesome games on netbooks you can’t go wrong with
1)Fallout 1 & 2 :The best rpg game ever
2)Undying…splendid horror fps with stunning visuals that runs great on a netbook
3)Outcast – Amazing graphic adventure for netbooks that holds up well even today
4)Omikron – Another excellent action adventure title
5)the settlers 2 or 3 – RTS
6)Thief 1 and 2 – one of the creepiest stealth games ever, thief 2 runs fine although thief 1 has a tendency to crash
7)Rainbow six (1 to 3 should work fine)
8)The suffering and its sequel:both work very well on netbooks
89Max payne 2 -works well
10)Aoe 3 -works well too
11)nosferatu:wrath of maliachi – Obscure horror fps title which is surprisingly good and is a homage to the original nosferatu
12)Grim Fandango : an adventure game you must play
13)Machinarium -beautiful adventure game
14)System shock 2:Atmospheric fps/rpg hybrid like deus ex
15)Any game based on the infinity engine eg:icewind dale 1 & 2, baldurs gate series and planetscape torment
16)american mcgees alice -works very well and so do most games based on the quake 3 engine
17)Call of duty- works very well
18)sacrifice -works with a few setting tweaks
19)LOTR:Return of the king -action title; works very well
20)Giants:citizen kabuto :Beautiful action game
Most games are available on GOG