Looking for new laptop games for an old arcade gamer like me?

[DaveC426913]

I'm an old man. I cut my teeth on *pew pew* games in the video arcades of bowling alleys. I burned out my video game organ decades ago.

The only carryover was games like Myst and SimCity and some of those Discover new lands type games. I like construction games rather than competitive or battle games.

I hate sitting in the front of the TV, but I spend lots of time outdoors on my laptop.

I'm thinking of checking out some modern games.

Can anyone suggest some games I might like that I can play on my lappie?I have a 17" ACER with a 1.6Gb Intel i5 8250 processor and 8Gb of RAM.

Do I need to have one of those game engine contraptions? Like steam, or whatever it is?

 

[fresh_42]

How about things like this: https://us.farmerama.com/ (online) or https://www.gametop.com/category/farm-games.html (offline)? Or do you want more fancy ones with more modern graphics?

 

[rcgldr]

Steam is a company that sells games as digital downloads. There may be a few cases where Steam accounts can have games that once came on DVD added to a player's account. Origin is similar but for what are/were once Electronic Arts games.

When you mentioned the Myst series, does that include Uru (several versions of this, you'd want the "complete" version), in addition to the 5 Myst games? The original Myst was a puzzle type game, but later versions of Myst had more of a storyline based on the original Myst and over time kept changing the rules and a bit of what happened in prior Myst games. The original Myst was a series of images, while Myst 3D was a smooth motion version of the same game. I think there is Uru online, it started off as a Beta, was shutdown, but now apparently is back, although it may be different than the original online version. I'm not sure if the online version has any cooperative (team) oriented requirements to reach specific goals.

There are the old Lucas Arts games, like "The Dig" and "Sam and Max", but you need to run them on a virtual PC with MSDOS installed, and for Sam and Max, turn off the music (it uses cd-rom audio, and it crashes a lot if music is enabled).

 

[DaveC426913]

How about things like this: https://us.farmerama.com/ (online) or https://www.gametop.com/category/farm-games.html (offline)? Or do you want more fancy ones with more modern graphics?

Maybe a little more sophisticated than that.
Modern graphics aren't essential, though I figure, if I'm going to go down this rabbit hole at all, I should probably see what the 21st century has to offer.

 

[DaveC426913]

Steam is a company that sells games as digital downloads. There may be a few cases where Steam accounts can have games that once came on DVD added to a player's account. Origin is similar but for what are/were once Electronic Arts games.

When you mentioned the Myst series, does that include Uru (several versions of this, you'd want the "complete" version), in addition to the 5 Myst games? The original Myst was a puzzle type game, but later versions of Myst had more of a storyline based on the original Myst and over time kept changing the rules and a bit of what happened in prior Myst games. The original Myst was a series of images, while Myst 3D was a smooth motion version of the same game. I think there is Uru online, it started off as a Beta, was shutdown, but now apparently is back, although it may be different than the original online version. I'm not sure if the online version has any cooperative (team) oriented requirements to reach specific goals.

There are the old Lucas Arts games, like "The Dig" and "Sam and Max", but you need to run them on a virtual PC with MSDOS installed, and for Sam and Max, turn off the music (it uses cd-rom audio, and it crashes a lot if music is enabled).

Yes, I very much enjoyed Riven and ... the third one.

No to Lucas Arts.
I don't want to go backwards.

 

[DrClaude]

I second @rcgldr's suggestion of Steam. You will find many games with a sandbox mode, where you can simply build things and explore what happens.

 

[russ_watters]

Civilization.

 

[DaveC426913]

I second @rcgldr's suggestion of Steam. You will find many games with a sandbox mode, where you can simply build things and explore what happens.

Steam is just a platform, right?

I'd rather figure out what games I'd like first, before investing in Steam.

 

[DaveC426913]

Civilization.

I played this once or twice on my C=64.

Has it gotten better?

 

[rbelli1]

before investing in Steam.

Steam is free as are a few of the games on it.

BoB

 

[harborsparrow]

I am not much of a gamer generally, but I did get pleasantly engrossed, maybe 5 years ago, in a game called World of Goo. Might be worth a look-see My husband also loved it. It was hilarious and employed believable physics in its challenges. It was either free or very low cost and got good reviews generally. It involved throwing around gooey balls to build things, tips things over, access things. Sounds weird I know. I can't remember more specifically. Note, this is a solitary game and not a social competition. Many recent games involve online communities of competitors, which at times can be pretty rough and tumble.

 

[gibberingmouther]

I used to be a big time PC gamer. I preferred single player RPGs.

Neverwinter Nights diamond is great, as is Neverwinter Nights 2 + the two expansions. The original Deus Ex was one of my favorite games ever, combining a cool story with multiple endings, cool cyborg abilities, and both action and RPG elements. You could beat the game by being an almost total pacifist or by using firearms and weapons such as a nanite sword.

Pillars of Eternity was a recent rpg that came out and it was awesome as far as I played it, definitely an evolution of the genre. I think there was a sequel as well. I heard Spore was cool - it's a game where you can "evolve" and guide your own alien species from a microbe stage to the space age, and then interact with other players' alien civilizations on the Internet. Probably a lot of replay value there.

There are 3 Mass Effect games you can get for the PC, an action RPG sci fi trilogy that I found for cheap from an online vendor. Kind of cool, but not really my thing.

Risen was apparently an awesome game that I would have liked to play, and it has 2 sequels. This is honestly the type of game that I love the most, but it was a little tricky because I wanted to play a Wizard and you have to basically use a strategy guide if you want to figure out how to unlock the wizard path. There was a similar type of action rpg called Arx Fatalis that was also awesome, and I did finish that one. Like Risen, you basically need to use a strategy guide or you'll never figure out some of the puzzles. Like the one portcullis you where you needed to randomly combine blood with a statue holding a bowl to activate. The rune based magic system was incredibly cool and I to this day wonder how they found this small team of people who programmed all that.

There are probably other good games out there. There was a Samurai game that looked awesome because of the gameplay and the insane number of possible branches in the storyline. There were 3 Witcher games, which supposedly built on themselves. I only played the first one and it remains one of my favorite games ever. There are the Elder Scrolls games, but to be honest they are just time wasters. A fun way to waste time and let your brain mull over things, but there are better story driven games out there that are more satisfying.

You can see that I have a preference for fantasy action RPGs. Yes, I do. I think it appeals to my OCD a little bit. Some of these games you really have to pay attention to details like what's in your inventory and the order in which you do things which can turn some people off. Some of them are not friendly to people new to the genre.

Neverwinter Nights diamond *is* friendly to newbs, as the non-diamond version was one of the first games of that type I played, and was my introduction to Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop gaming. I tried to make my own D&D based computer game, inspired by the fan made modules of my childhood, but alas I ended up cancelling the project … after several years and countless hours spent. I did learn a lot though, about coding and game design, and I made a cool soundtrack. Just mentioning it because it is an example of how magical these games are (especially to a younger person), and how they can inspire one to great endeavors. Like Arx Fatalis apparently was a "commercial failure" but remains one of the most loved games by fans. I had to fiddle around and download some updates before I could get it to work on my computer, but it was worth it. It is super cheap now. Kind of violent though.

 

[rcgldr]

Steam is just a platform, right?

Steam is a distributor of digital downloads. Multiple software companies sell their software via Steam (some of them sell via other distributors in addition to Steam). My impression is that Steam only supports PC / Mac based games. I don' t own any consoles, so I don't know who does distribution for those. Origin is another distributor of digital downloads. As mentioned before, in some cases you can add media based games to your steam or origin account, but I'm not sure of the purpose of this, since you don't need an account to get patches for an existing media based game. In the case of Origin, some older media based titles have been converted into digital downloads.

There is a risk with how digital downloads implement copy protection. In the case of some Origin games, the copy protection relied on a server (such as securerom), which is now shut down. There is a workaround in a few cases, but for the most part, the affected games are no longer playable without some type of hack made to the game to defeat the copy protection. Similarly for media based games with copy protection, Windows 10 prevents media based protection schemes like safedisc or securerom from installing the drivers they rely on to implement the copy protection. Windows 7 and Windows 8 require some permission overrides to allow the drivers to be installed. If a game is popular enough, there is probably some hack for it to defeat the copy protection, but if somehow a player's usage of a hack gets back to the distributor site, that player's account and all associated games could be shutdown. The workaround here is to create one account per game, which is a nuisance.

Similarly, sometimes additional content for a game that requires some type of server interaction is lost if the server stops supporting the interaction or is shutdown. This also happened at Origin, where the server no longer sends "unlock" messages for certain games when a player signs in, meaning the additional content, if not already enabled and stored in a savefile, can no longer be accessed.

https://store.steampowered.com

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store

 

[DaveC426913]

There is a risk with how digital downloads implement copy protection.

Isn't this problem defeated by paying for the games?

 

[DrClaude]

Isn't this problem defeated by paying for the games?

No. The point is that if the copy protection relies on a server that stops operating, the game can't confirm that you paid for it and won't let you play.

That said, the games I have bought through Steam I can play offline, so that doesn't seem to be a problem there.

 

[harborsparrow]

P s I think your venture is worth doing. I seem to have lived around several gamers and saw their games. Some were rather amazing. Hope you find somegood ones a dlet us know if you do.

 

[rcgldr]

There is a risk with how digital downloads implement copy protection. In the case of some Origin games ...

Isn't this problem defeated by paying for the games?

As posted by DrClaude, this is affecting games that players paid for. The issue is that the verification process depends on a server that is now shutdown. In the case of Electronic Arts / Origin, Origin no longer sells these games, but players who purchased a game 90 days or more before the game became unplayable are probably out the money they spent on the game (if it is less than 90 days, I think you can get your money back). I know that some Origin games were affected by securom server shutdown. I don't know if any of the Steam store games relied on securrom server. In the case of Origin, it has also affected the "additional" content (like limited edition versions of a game) that players paid for. Again in this situation, Origin will stop selling versions of a game with additional content, but online retailers like amazon will still be selling media based additional content games, with no warning that the additional content can no longer be unlocked.

That said, the games I have bought through Steam I can play offline, so that doesn't seem to be a problem there.

Some of the steam titles, such as the Tomb Raider series, will occasionally require you to go online, sometimes (but not always) to update the version of the game, even if you've opted to stay with a specific version of the game, where sometimes steam removes the version a player has from its list of options, forcing a player to update to a newer version. I tried disconnecting from the internet during actual gameplay, but steam checks for updates in background mode whenever a system is running, even if not using steam or any steam distributed game.