So for the past few months, I've been loving my new, frighteningly fast, gaming PC. It has done everthing I could ever want from it and asks for more. Now, though, I am away from my onyxobelisk as I am on a little vacation. Me and my girlfriend went out of town for a week. No real reason really, just to go somewhere else. During the day it's great, we wander around Vancouver (BC, Canada), go to interesting places. Today we went to the aquarium and I got to see a bunch of different kinds of jelly fish (there were lots of other sea life there as well). They are odd creatures that are strangely hypnotic, I could honestly watch them all day. Once our day of adventure is over, we return to the hotel and my girlfriend tends to promptly fall asleep. This leaves me with very little to do, other than toy around on her netbook we brought. Almost every game that I have access to on Steam far and away exceeds this little things meager specs (1.6Ghz with 1GB ram with no vid card, running XP, though I've cut out all the bloat). This left me at a disadvantage as I was bored, wanting to game and have nothing but time. So, I've looked, and I've found some.
Flash Games
Yes, we all know them. Those horrible time wasters that your co-workers or your mom gets hooked on. They don't provide an immersive experience, they don't really have much of a story and they tend to be very, very ugly. They are great when you have 15 minutes to kill, or if you just don't want to work, but they don't really scratch the itch. There are some good ones that I've wasted some time on.
Fancy Pants Adventuresis a must. You can play the origial one on Armor Games. It's a great platformer that will soon be exported over to XBLA and PSN. Nothing more than you're a guy in bright orange pants, jumping on spiders and picking up spirals. The ones to come have some story about rescuing your sister, but it doesn't really matter.
flOwis antother good one. It's another one that has been recently exported into the main market. It's got a great aesthetic that works well and is very minimal, so it doesn't strain this little netbook much. Again, no story to speak of, just to eat and climb up the food chain.
PopCap Gamesis probably the largest of the flash game makers. Their dynasty is pretty much based off of Bejeweled, but there are some others that are better in my opinion. InsaneAquarium is my current fave. Probably because I was never very good at Bejeweled.
GamesMoreThan 10 Years Old
There have been a lot of great games that have come before this era of high rez. There are a lot of great games that are available for free if you know about them, or have stumbled across them in the past. There are also some that you can pay a few bucks for if it's an option. Personally I'm going to dig through my collection of old games at home and prevent this from happening in the future.
Command and Conqueris actually free?!? Yes a year or so ago, EA (who now holds the rights) decided that they would release the original as a free download in honnour of it's 15th anniversary. It isn't a big download (back then multiple CD's were almost unheard of, it came on 2) so if you want it, go and get it. Tiberian Sun (aka. C&C2) and Red Alert are also on there. Hope you have some bandwidth.
Elder Scrolls III can't take credit for. I read about it last night on someones blog (can't remember who). It's a palty 148 MB, so it's not going to hurt you to try and run it on anything that has a modern OS. I've heard it's difficult, but I'm cool with that. I have yet to even boot it up however.
GOG.comis great if you've ever purchased anything from them before. I have so I just redownloaded some stuff over the course of the day and blammo, I've got Fallout, Arcanum and Masters of Orion on this bad thing, Those three games have probably wasted a few solid months of my life, so a week is chump change.
That's about it for now. I don't really need to waste too much time talking about me finding ways to waste time. Here is something to enjoy though if you aren't currently downloading the free C&C games (which you should be), a tank of moon jellies. 