Discussions

Finally, I bought a netbook, after about a year of hemming and hawing, mainly for writing and having a little bang-around machine than for gaming. But then I noticed that you can find refurbished netbooks out there for as little as $150, which is just a hair more than it costs to pick up my favorite portable gaming system of all time, the Nintendo DS. That's crazy! And while the types of games that are available for PCs are often considerably different than those designed specifically for a console, there are plenty of games that can now fall into a "portable" category that I hadn't quite considered before. Of course there's one fairly major limitation (for the moment): Most netbooks have pretty dinky 3D capability. So modern 3D games are right out. But that's fine. Older games (say, five years or older) work just fine on netbooks (and some newer ones will, too, provided you can turn down the graphics settings). And don't forget, there are plenty of new games that don't need top end hardware. I just fired up World of Goo (http://2dboy.com) on my Ubuntu-powered netbook and it's totally playable. (Too bad I already beat it!) Over the next few weeks I'm going to try to discover some of the better options out there for netbook gaming and share them here. But don't let that hold you back from telling me about games you've found that play well on netbooks, as well as have gameplay that lends itself to playing on the go.