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Joe Rybicki is a freelance writer who’s spent the last 13 years covering the video game and technology industries. He currently runs Plastic Axe, a blog about music games.
Netbooks are, generally speaking, fairly businesslike devices. We buy them for word processing, web browsing, and e-mail, not for music production or game playing. We buy them for their size and weight and battery life, not for their graphics chips and processing power.
But netbook owners aren’t totally out of luck when it comes to gaming, you know. We’ve got a whole suite of older games at our disposal, for one thing; many of the hottest games from even three or four years back run just fine on a machine with a 1.6 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and no dedicated video card. And thanks to the internet and other wonderful technologies, you can take your pick of older titles via services like GameTap or GOG.com.
But that’s not what I came here to tell you about. I came to talk about five recent games that your little road warrior can handle.
5. Torchlight
If you’re old enough to remember Diablo, the concept of Torchlight will be very familiar: Create a character, equip him or her with fantasy weapons, armor, and gear, and hit the dungeons to bash the crap out of waves of nasty creatures.
The hack-and-slash RPG is certainly nothing new, but Torchlight’s gorgeously cartoony art style and slick production values bring a breath of fresh air to the genre. And once you’ve spent some time digging into the game, you’ll discover that the character progression is astonishingly deep and varied, more so than what anyone has any right to expect from the simple, click-kill-loot-repeat gameplay.
You won’t find much to write home about in terms of the story, sure. But once you’ve gotten a taste of what the game offers in terms of character development, enemy evolution, and new areas to explore, it becomes astonishingly difficult to step away.
“But the game just came out last month!” you say. “Surely my lowly netbook can’t possibly handle it!” you say. Get this: Not only does the game run fine on most netbooks, it actually includes a special “Netbook Mode” toggle in the options screen that optimizes the game for underpowered machines. All that, and it’s only $20.
You can grab a demo from the official site, and unlock the full game via PayPal or Google Checkout. So on top of everything else, it’s convenient!
The Acer Aspire One D250 is the latest 10 inch netbook from Acer. It has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU and 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, but fits into a smaller and lighter case than the Acer Aspire One D150.
Joe Rybicki is a freelance writer who’s spent the last 13 years covering the video game and technology industries. He lives in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and laughs at your commute. He picked up his first netbook a few weeks ago and has been using his new Aspire One D250 to work on the road. Read more at joerybicki.com.
When last we spoke, I promised to report back on the Acer Aspire One D250 after spending a week lugging it around downtown Los Angeles. Let me tell you, after just the first day I was pretty much ready to declare this purchase one of the smartest in recent memory. Through a day of press conferences scattered throughout downtown L.A., I walked about five and a half miles with this thing nestled in a shoulder bag…and I barely even noticed it was there.
But it’s not just the weight that convinced me I’d made the right choice. It’s the battery life. Oh yes, the battery life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Joe Rybicki is a freelance writer who’s spent the last 13 years covering the videogame and technology industries. He lives in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and laughs at your commute. You can read more of his writing on various topics at joerybicki.com.
In the summer of 2002, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, in the process going from a five-minute car commute to an hour-long commute by ferry. It was time to get a laptop. So I did my research, I saved up some cash, and I bought a Sony Vaio PCG-SRX99. It had a 10-inch screen, weighed just over three pounds with the battery, and was an inch and a half thick. It had an underpowered processor — an 850MHz Celeron — and almost nothing in the RAM or HDD department (256MB and 20GB, respectively). It was essentially a proto-netbook, heralding most of the features that, six years later, we would come to associate with the netbook form factor. Except one:
It cost sixteen hundred dollars.
(To be fair, that was relatively cheap for a notebook in those days, especially one small enough to throw in a man-purse and light enough to carry along on a commute that involved a walk of nearly a mile through downtown San Francisco. But still: nearly two grand with tax!)
I’m telling you all this so that you’ll understand my shock when I finally made the leap to a real netbook and discovered that it was a superior product in nearly every way…and for less than one-quarter the price.
The object of my affection is the Acer Aspire One D250, newly launched here in the U.S. and retailing for around $375 in “diamond black” with a 6-cell battery. (Subtract $25 for any other color, and another $25 for a 3-cell battery.) And superior though it may be in performance to my trusty old Vaio, it’s extremely similar in function.
