Originally published in print, September 2021.
Spoilers For Good Will Hunting
The cost of PC gaming is prohibitively high. Most comprehensive gaming PCs range from €1,500 to more than €2,000. But those PCs are only necessary if you want to play the newest, fanciest, most high fidelity games. The PC or laptop you use for college assignments is probably capable of running some of the best games out there. This article is not a list of games that will work on most computers, but instead a guide, a map if you will, of advice on how to locate games that will work on any modern laptop.
The first, and most obvious, way to play games carries the distinct nostalgia of a school computer room: your browser. Any game you can access directly through your browser will be playable on your computer and, though there is a lot of garbage, there are some treasures among all that trash. Most notably for me, is Tetris Online. Browser games are typically simple puzzle games, the type with which you are likely familiar – chess, backgammon, poker, etc. Simple as they are, they can often be enough to hit that gaming serotonin button in your brain. The other way to use a browser to game (which TN2, of course, would never recommend) is through illegal emulators. These are websites which allow you to play retro games on your browser, typically without the permission of the game’s publishers. They will also often add features that did not exist in the original (e.g. the ability to pick any level from the beginning of the game). Be warned though, if you choose to go down this route, you must be careful which emulators you use – it’s the wild west out there and some of them may end up doing your PC more harm than good.
If you’ve dabbled in browser games and dodgy emulators, the next step is Steam. Steam is the primary marketplace for downloading PC games. Notorious for their semi-frequent sales where game prices are slashed to such a degree as to make payment basically a formality, Steam is the best value proposition for PC Gaming. Furthermore, on Steam you also have a whole host of free-to-play games and game demos which will keep you busy for quite some time before you need to invest a single cent. Notably, they also have a full refund policy if you have owned the game for less than two weeks and played it for less than two hours, so if you buy it and find that it can’t run on your laptop, no harm done.
But, and this is the key question, how do you tell if a game will be able to run on your laptop before you boot it up? There are a few rules of thumb that I have found helpful in my experiments with PC gaming. Rule 1: indie pixel art games are your friends. The most difficult thing for computers to do is render high-end graphics, so low-end, artisanal graphics can run on most computers like a dream. Games like Celeste (2018), Blasphemous (2019), Carrion (2020), and many others play as smooth as you like. Rule 2: delve into old games. Your laptop may struggle to run Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but running Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is barely an inconvenience. I have yet to find a specific year cut off date for when 3D titles no longer function, but the furthest I’ve pushed mine so far is 2011 with The Stanley Parable (demo, because we’re on a budget here!). Rule 3: side scrollers tend to be fine, 3D games less so. For example, Spiritfarer (2020) worked wonderfully but Lake (2021) stuttered even during cutscenes on the lowest visual settings. Rule 3.5: if you insist on playing 3D games (some titles will work) you may want to invest in a mouse. Rule 4: there are always visual novels. Visual novels are text based interactive fiction games that require little to no effort on the part of your computer. Though I have not played many myself, I can highly recommend the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (2019) as one of the best detective series of the DS era remastered for the PC.
I guess to conclude, the true answer to the question of whether or not you’ll know if your PC is capable of running a game is that you won’t, but that’s part of the thrill. It’s a little like that scene in Good Will Hunting (Van Sant, 1997) where every day Ben Affleck (you, the humble gamer) shows up, not knowing if Matt Damon (the game you just downloaded) is still going to be at his house (able to run on your PC) and when he finally isn’t there (the game successfully runs), you can walk back to your car, shrug and say “he’s not there” (play the game).
