So little power. So much game.

[Sumea]

Recently, I bought a laptop from a friend to do some serious business with on the road more than anything, write stuff, be my sofa gaming chat companion that type of stuff. It was stock with i3 8130U with Intel UHD 620 gpu integrated, with soldered on 4gb of ram. I After deciding correctly for such specs that a light Linux distro is a must, and gave it all the productivity stuff I wanted and initially meaning to have no games on it... I still had to put every game on it it could run. Guess that is a gamer's curse. I did upgrade the machine after the fact with 8Gb RAM stick giving it total of 12, and installing cachyos that smoothed out performance nicely on the PC. For example, before upgrades Dreamcast emulation was utterly unplayable, jumping into feasably playable after them.

This made me a fun thing testing out stuff back and forth, which games need way more power than you assumed, which games work much better than you anticipated with such a low spec for gaming, etc. I would say "Emulation is kinda obvious answer" this machine likely emulates everything everyone is able to surmise themselves. But the area slightly outside emulation, or more exotic emulation things are OK. Thus far my list would have:

Doom, Doom 2, various expansions. Kinda obvious and just about any engine of your choice will do the job fine.
Quake 1-3 - Less obvious with 3 but all have choice of few stellar sourceports, out of which I put in vkquake, yquake2 and ioquake3. All run beautifully at native 1080p
Daikatana - Also has native multiplatform including linux files from 1.3 development team. Runs beautifully and fast. Though Daikatana shines more as a multiplayer game and you need to give smoke signals to the natives to setup a good MP session.
Ion Fury - Modern boomer shooter that has native Linux version as well. All hail BuildEngine.
Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (Ephinea): Just setup with lutris on linux, pair your bluetooth controller, stay more in 720p resolution zone and have grand good time.
Diablo II - Given but not immediately obvious. Proton handles the windows version nicely on linux.
Pro Pinball Trilogy - These are my favorite pinball games that utilize pre rendered graphics. Very playable on just about anything.
Marble Blast Ultra (OpenMBU64) - Runs beautifully at 720p (it's original resolution). Very good fun especially if you pair up a dual analog controller to roll with.
Marble it Up! Ultra - Runs significantly worse than OpenMBU but minimize graphics and resolution and it will 60fps with you. Also have bit more RAM than 4gigs.
Balatro - Balatro. (Does have fanmade native ports on numerous platforms including native Linux version)

Surprising failures:
Buckshot Roulette and Demon's Tilt. Both needed apparently way more power from your GPU than I assumed. Demon's Tilt skirted around by just not hitting a high enough FPS for comfortable play, but buckshot roulette was utter slideshow city. Some of the modern "PS1 look" games can be deceiving in how much they still actually need despite the end result players see on their screen.

So my thread topic is: Which games that require very little oomph from your PC do you think are great/quintessential/hidden gems etc.? Obvious emulation answers aside. Can be retro, can be surprises from modern indies, etc. The linux compatibility thing is just personal thing that is not exactly part of the thread, just something I focus on as it is part of the search criteria for me. Focus on great games that run on little.

 

[FateLanegod]

Old Bioware games on Infinity Engine like Baldur’s Gate 1-2 should do just fine.
You can even try Aurora Engine - Neverwinter Nights could be run too I guess, probably you’d have to disable shaders and advanced effects.

There are tons of games that could be played depending on your tastes, from isometric RTS and TBS to visual novels and even rhythm games. Cannot say much about FPS, but UT2004 and so numerous titles based on Unreal Engine should perform just fine, with some balanced tweaks of course.
Actually, I had run Doom III and Quake 4 on even less powerful PC. But 640x480

 

[Sumea]

Old Bioware games on Infinity Engine like Baldur’s Gate 1-2 should do just fine.
You can even try Aurora Engine - Neverwinter Nights could be run too I guess, probably you’d have to disable shaders and advanced effects.

There are tons of games that could be played depending on your tastes, from isometric RTS and TBS to visual novels and even rhythm games. Cannot say much about FPS, but UT2004 and so numerous titles based on Unreal Engine should perform just fine, with some balanced tweaks of course.
Actually, I had run Doom III and Quake 4 on even less powerful PC. But 640x480

Yeah. It is fun going retro in your graphic settings requirements and getting playability from surprising games on real low end hardware.
UT2004 was definitely in "Gotta test" though it is clear some native client by fans will run just stellar, but the game is also great and fun and played still today so valid. I even have legit CD keys like I have for Q3 from steam purchase. Some of those remasters you mention have even native linux versions too. Few western teams like that care about that stuff.
The next endeavor I actually gave up with a long time ago was my 2016 Atom Tablet laptop hybrid. It needs to have Win 10 for full functionality of both tablet and Laptop modes, and even if it is very stripped down through revisionOS (similar to AtlasOS etc.) it still will sputter and fudder with it's dual core 2W Atom and integrated GPU of similar ability, and 4 gigs of ram, no more, no less. Yeah it can emulate few things just about fine but that is it.

 

[PrismRed]

My man, you gotta have The Sims.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

I dunno uhhh counter strike 1.6? Or red alert 2......hell hitman blood money? or men of war

 

[Sorion]

those UHD 620 graphics can be quite decent, if, you're running dual channel memory that is, that technology doubles the available bandwidth of your system, and therefore it improves the memory bandwidth of your iGPU as well. that's why you saw a massive performance increase at dreamcast emulation after you added that extra memory stick, you activated dual channel by doing that. Acording to some benchmarks I've seen, you should be able to play a lot of early 2010's PC games at 60fps without any problems, I know for a fact that fallout new vegas runs well on uhd 620, as long as you keep it at low settings or lower resolutions. The translation layer used to play windows games might make you lose performance in comparison to windows tough, that i3 CPU is quite limited by today standars and translating directX instructions to OpenGL might result in a higher performance penalty compared with stronger CPUs. I guess you'll have to test the laptop in depth in order to find out.

 

[Tonberry]

Old Bioware games on Infinity Engine like Baldur’s Gate 1-2 should do just fine.

Seconding these!

Also these off the top of my head:

• Heroes of Might & Magic 3
• Age of Empires 1-2
• Warcraft 2
• Warcraft 3 (if the PC can handle it)
• The first three Monkey Island games
• Dark Forces

 

[aru.aru]

The 1st American Mcgee Alice game is always worth checking out. No One Lives Forever 1+2 are some pretty fun titles. For Indies maybe stuff like OneShot, or OG Cave Story, RPG maker maker games and VNs are also always pretty safe bets.

 

[Netra]

Sacred and Sacred 2.
Iconoclast.
CrossCode.

 

[moonbits]

Starcraft
The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall
Blade Runner
Full Throttle
Fallout 1 & 2

 

[Sumea]

those UHD 620 graphics can be quite decent, if, you're running dual channel memory that is, that technology doubles the available bandwidth of your system, and therefore it improves the memory bandwidth of your iGPU as well. that's why you saw a massive performance increase at dreamcast emulation after you added that extra memory stick, you activated dual channel by doing that. Acording to some benchmarks I've seen, you should be able to play a lot of early 2010's PC games at 60fps without any problems, I know for a fact that fallout new vegas runs well on uhd 620, as long as you keep it at low settings or lower resolutions. The translation layer used to play windows games might make you lose performance in comparison to windows tough, that i3 CPU is quite limited by today standars and translating directX instructions to OpenGL might result in a higher performance penalty compared with stronger CPUs. I guess you'll have to test the laptop in depth in order to find out.

well, what I read, especially with using cachy OS and doing some other stuff like diabling mitigations against spectre and such, those will likely play better than on windows. The only issues have been that there is Vulkan 1.3 support but retroarch flycast gets crashy if using vulkan. But it has been alright in many other applications such as using wayland in general etc. I am not sure if intel had async dual channel as I have 4 gig paired with 8gig but speeds match so it can be.

 

[ObscureJigglypuff]

My
hidden gem
for
you
is Lucius.

 

[Zerohour2k12]

Sands of Time Trilogy
Legacy of Kain series
Sudeki
Need for Speed Underground 2, Carbon and Most Wanted
Medal of Honor Allied Assault

 

[Zerpina]

Double Dragon Gaiden - Rise Of The Dragons
Fun little side-scrolling beat 'em up. I think it even has a native Linux port, it's in the same vein as TMNT: Shredder's Revenge.

Iron Meat
Basiclly, Modern day Contra 1 with Blood guts gore and overly fleshy looking aliens.. Damn fun tho,

Night Slashers - Remake
Just what the name says, remake of the old arcade game.

Post automatically merged: Today at 5:57 PM

*Edit
Almost forgot, Absolutely have to have Fallout 1 & 2 they are absolutely Great games.

 

[Danteh]

This is the only FPS game that i need if i have a potato that can run peak games

 

[Badseed Badseed]

EVERYONE here should be ashamed for not suggesting: Half-Life.
It has been ported to everything, you could run it on a potato.
You also have your choice of HL1, 2, Legacy, Blue Shift, Opposing Force,
Black Mesa and Black Mesa: Blue Shift. Oh, don't forget Portal. There's 8 for ya.

 

[CheesyExplosive]

Grip.... a rollcage game

 

[Netra]

EVERYONE here should be ashamed for not suggesting: Half-Life.
It has been ported to everything, you could run it on a potato.
You also have your choice of HL1, 2, Legacy, Blue Shift, Opposing Force,
Black Mesa and Black Mesa: Blue Shift. Oh, don't forget Portal. There's 8 for ya.

View attachment 146879

The original Half-Life runs well, but the Steam versions have some issues on those i3 processors, or at least they did for me on an old laptop with a similar CPU.
Otherwise, I would have recommended it.

 

[Clippy]

I guess it's as good time as any to plug the PC recommendation thread.

You'll find the list at the bottom of the OP and most of the games on it are old as dirt so they shouldn't give you much trouble.