Laptop-Friendly Gaming

I just moved to Canada and my desktop and Xbox 360 won't be reaching me for another month or so. For the past week my Nintendo DS has been my savior but I have a need for some competitive multiplayer gameplay that the DS just can't give me. As a result, I've been looking for games that will work on my not-so-gaming-friendly laptop and I've found a few, some of which may surprise you. After installing and testing, (and some uninstalling too... darn 60Gb hard drive), many of my mighty collection of PC games, I settled on a lineup that I consider a solid and well-rounded collection for anyone in my position with a relatively cheap laptop with limited hard drive space.

First of all, so you know what I'm working with here are the gaming-relevant specifications for my laptop. It is a year and a half old and cost $640 at purchase:

processor: 1.60 GHz Turion 64 X2 TL-50
memory: 2Gb G.Skill PC2 4200 laptop ram
graphics: Integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, 256 Mb shared memory (steals from system memory)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

The Games

StarCraft: The long-awaited sequel may be just around the corner, but after ten years this game is still as great as it was when it came out and you can still find people playing it online. It's real time strategy that is a deep or shallow as you want it to be and so ridiculously well balanced that the only time I ever cursed a race for being cheap was when I found myself brought to my knees by a massive, well planned zergle rush, (though it was really my fault for not being prepared).

The Orange Box, Counter Strike Source & Day of Defeat Source: I don't know what it is with the Source engine, but my laptop has absolutely no trouble at all throwing down consistently solid framerates with the graphical settings at mid-high with the resolution at my laptop's max, (1280x800). The engine may be three and a half years old but it still looks fantastic and the gameplay in these games is a solid as you can get. Half-Life 2 and Eps 1 & 2 are some of the best single player experiences you can get on a PC, Portal is a great brain-bending diversion for a few hours and DoD:Source, CS:Source and TF2 take online multiplayer and compress, polish and refine it until you get PC gaming diamonds. Oh yeah, you also get Peggle with Orange Box, which has about the highest addictiveness:simplicity ratio ever.


The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind: My favorite open world game of all time and a shining example of what a Western RPG can be. From the moment I stepped off the boat in Seyda Neen and saw the beautiful, open world for me to explore I knew I was playing a game I had never quite experienced before. One of my personal favorite aspects of the game is the extraordinarily varied cultures. Each town has it's own distinct architecture and culture and you never get the impression of cookie cutter game design, quite a feat with a game of Morrowind's size. It doesn't look nearly as good as Oblivion, and you'll notice some unfortunate load times between areas, but those are small complaints over what is an otherwise amazing achievement in game design. The game looked and ran fantastic on my laptop even before I upgraded to 2 Gb of ram and with two expansion packs, it takes a long, long time for this game to get old.

Sam & Max: Season One: If you like adventure games, get this. If you yearn for the good old days of classic Lucasarts Adventures, or even their text-based forebears, get this. Heck, if you have even the slightest sense of humor, get this. The new, episodic Sam & Max is absolutely hi-larious and expertly written. The only downsides are that the episodic nature keeps the season from quite getting the true feel of a grand adventure, and it's also a bit on the easy side, but that doesn't keep it from being terribly entertaining. When you finish it and crave for more Sam & Max you can move on to season two!

Trackmania Nations Forever: A bare, stripped down arcade racer with great graphics, hundreds of courses and the most amazing ranking system I've ever seen, this game easily justifies a full $40 price tag. The catch... it's absolutely free! This one's a no-brainer so do yourself a favor and download it now.

Halo: This one might be a bit controversial, especially among PC gamers, but the original Halo was one of the best games ever made when it came out on the Xbox. Once it was ported to PC it was even better. Not only was the single player campaign a blast with spectacularly designed levels, but the multiplayer was simple, fast paced, and well balanced. I spent many nights playing Halo PC on my computer over the dorm network with the other guys on my floor. There aren't quite as many people playing online as there were about four years ago, but if you can get a game going you'll realize that the gameplay is still as solid as ever. The only downside is the lack of co-op in the single player campaign.

Civilization IV: This is one of the finest strategy experiences ever crafted. An empire-building turn-based strategy game where you start in the bronze age and work your way through history till the twenty-first century. Civ4 takes the previous Civ games and Alpha-Centauris and works them into something more than the sum of their parts. If you aren't a fan of turn-based games this may not be for you, otherwise you owe yourself to play this game. To call it 4X just doesn't do it justice.