Sunday, October 17, 2010

Netbook Game Quest 1: Find 5 games that are playable on a netbook

Here are the games I installed and tried: Dungeons and Dragons Online, Guild Wars, Perfect World International, Battle of Immortals, Conquer Online, Dynasty Warriors Online, Requiem, Runes of Magic, and Warhammer Online.

Results:

Dungeons and Dragons Online/www.ddo.com

Game install did take a very long time, but the game works great! I did have to adjust the video settings to the minimum, but spent hours playing this game. Have also gone through several patches on the game now and none have affected playability.

Guild Wars/www.guildwars.com

This is the only game I tried that was not free. The normal price is about 30 USD for the game,and 20 USD for each of the expansion packs Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North. However, there are no monthly fees after this. I purchased the game by itself at a book store discounted to 6 USD to try first. Again the game install did take quite a while, but this game also ran very well on my netbook. I don't think I had to even adjust any settings for this one.

Guild Wars 2 is set to be released sometime in the near future and I will review this as soon as I get a chance to see if it also works on a netbook.

Perfect World International and Battle of Immortals/www.perfectworld.com

These games are created by a North American subsidiary of Perfect World Beijing, so they do have alot of Chinese game style influence. I have to hand it to PW, they have several different games available for free download from mmorpg to a single-player dungeon crawler style game. I tried these two games and was very impressed. The download was much faster than previous games I tried and both worked perfectly on my netbook.

I plan on trying all games available from this site, including Forsaken World which I recieved a beta key to try out Oct. 27th. I suspect that if past experience is any indicator, all of these games should work quite well on my netbook, but I will definitely post my findings.

Conquer Online/co.91.com

Conquer is another Asian style game featuring very simple gameplay and emphasis on PvP. It installed very quickly on my computer, and is playable but with some issues. Because this game supports a minimum resolution of 1000x768 and my netbook is 1000x600 the game does not stretch to fit the screen. It sits in the middle of my screen with a 1/2 inch of desktop on either side and the task bar often comes up over the Conquer screen. Because my netbook already has such a tiny screen, having an even smaller game screen does make gameplay difficult but not impossible. I still had fun playing this game for a few hours.

Dynasty Warriors Online/dynastywarriors.aeriagames.com

I did not expect this game to play at all on my netbook, as I was far below the minimum system requirements, but was asked by curious friends to try. The game installed fairly quickly and although I did experience a similar resolution problem to Conquer online, it was still very playable. The gaps on either side of the game screen were much smaller and the task bar did not interfere with game play. This game also ran much more smoothly. So although it does have some issues, is very playable on a netbook.

Runes of Magic, Requiem, and Warhammer Online

These are games that absolutely failed on my netbook. I was not surprised that Requiem failed, though I tried it anyway, however I was very disappointed by Runes of Magic and Warhammer Online, and here's why. I had read on other blogs/forums that Runes of Magic was one of the few games that would work on a netbook successfully. I was able to install it, but not able to load the game at all. Warhammer Online has minimal system requirements so I thought that would work in my favor for this game. It did, sort of. The game installed and loaded, but even at all minimal settings the graphics were so distorted that it was completely unplayable. Again this is just my experience, and if anyone else has been able to get these games to run on a netbook, please let me know!

I will post again soon, and again if anyone has suggestions on games to try please let me know!


Draiga Veritas
Rogue Paladin Venomancer Barbarian Necromancer Ranger Extraordinaire

1 comment:

  1. Right on! It's awesome to hear that DDO works, and Guild Wars is a nice touch as well. I actually haven't heard about these Perfect World games and I'm going to look into them.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete