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!
