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So far, I have the ability to play:

Dead Space 1 and 2, and am TRYING to play Mass Effect 1. So far, it's pretty glitchy and freezes often.

Right now I generally play some older games like Diablo 2 and Fallout 2. Can anyone give me any good ideas for some great games of yore that will run on my BS rig while I am waiting on replacement parts for my melted desktop?

For old RPG's, check out Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. There is a mandatory unofficial patch but it should run on any current machine.

Possibly Tales of Maj'Eyal?

It's a more modern game, but it's not particularly performance or graphics intensive. Roguelike RPG.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and it's sequel.

If you want something super old to spend a minute on here and there, when I was a kid I really liked Raptor Call of the Shadows.

If you're in the D2 kind of era of games then I'd suggest hitting up GOG as they've loads of old games


Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Startopia
Homeworld (the classic version not remastered - homeworld 2 might be too much if you're only at D2)
Starcraft 1 (the remastered can run on old settings)
Warcraft 1 and 2
Age of Wonders (any of the series before 3)
Disciples 1 and 2
Unreal Tournament
Master of Magic
Dominions 5 (though it might end up chugging as things get bigger, but might well run well enough if you don't simulate battles - hard to say as whilst its simple in style it is modern)
Armed and Dangerous
Giants Citizen Kabuto

Diablo 1 is available on GOG. Bit of a downgrade compared to 2, but nails the atmosphere really well. I hear there is a mod out there that expands on the game further. For a Diablo-like game, Din’s Curse should run okay. It’s like Diablo, but with a time limit.

Can’t go wrong with Doom, especially with the absurd number of mods and maps out there.

You can also get the first two Elder Scrolls games for free in some GOG purchases. Morrowind might run reasonably well enough. If you can get that, it should come with the first two Elder Scrolls games as well. Arena is a decent dungeon crawler. Daggerfall is a trade off between game breaking jank and ambitious ideas for the time.

Managed to get System Shock 2 running on my shoddy old Dell laptop with no issues at all.

Aside from those:
- Quake 3
- Eador Genesis (mix of Heroes of Might and Magic with Civilization with a brutal difficulty)
- The Build Engine shooters (Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior)
- Darklands
- Geneforge and Avernum (if you buy the GOG collection, they should keep you going for a while)
- TSR Gold Box RPGs (Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder)
- Ultima (though 4 is probably the better starting point as opposed to 1)
- Sid Meier’s Civilization 3 should run fine, but I’m quite certain Alpha Centauri can be run just as well.

 Overread wrote:
If you're in the D2 kind of era of games then I'd suggest hitting up GOG as they've loads of old games


Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (Tried 5, and while it was fun, the game itself is so RNG that it makes strategy difficult.)
Startopia
Homeworld (the classic version not remastered - homeworld 2 might be too much if you're only at D2) ((Looks AWESOME))
Starcraft 1 (the remastered can run on old settings) (Literally beat it last week)
Warcraft 1 and 2 (Last month)
Age of Wonders (any of the series before 3) (Looks cool, but not into these epic Total War style games)
Disciples 1 and 2 (Bought it, installed it, doesn't work on 10 without a lot of work)
Unreal Tournament (Doesn't work on this PC without severe lag, which being a MP game, is death)
Master of Magic (Looks interesting!)
Dominions 5 (though it might end up chugging as things get bigger, but might well run well enough if you don't simulate battles - hard to say as whilst its simple in style it is modern) (Looks great, likely won't run)
Armed and Dangerous (Downloaded, playing now!)
Giants Citizen Kabuto (Doesn't function, crashes constantly, can't find a fix)

My favorite stupid little game will always be Lords of the Realm. Crusader quickly replaced it, but I will always have a soft spot for Lords.

WAIT we are forgetting the greatest game ever invented for the simple computer -- MINESWEEPER

Starcraft 1 and Diablo 1 or 2 maybe.

I've been seeing people play the old X-com games. That game couldn't take much to play.

If you can find a way to play it somehow you can play the old command and conquer games up to red alert 2. It's more hard to find than it should be to run it.

Oh if you want something that can eat hours - X Beyond the Frontier would likely work

Galactic civilization 1 and possibly 2 are also not tough to play.

Lol you could also probably play Oregon trail or something if your computer is that horrible.

Most computers these days are too good to run older games. If I remember even years ago people had trouble running old games like phantasmagoria 1 and 2

I have an old computer, and I still play Rome:total War. Just a great game with a ton of replay value.

Atom Zombie Smasher. Tactical, strategic, zombies, and units you can level up. It’s awesome.

The X-com Series can die in the thousand fires of Prosporo. I hate that series with all my soul. If it isn't the insanely difficult game play, its the blatant cpu cheating that goes on. Nope, F that entire series in the A. I'd rather shove shards of glass in my eyes than try to replay the originals.

Go, right now I just discovered that somehow, my junko laptop runs Mass Effect 1. Not sure how, but I'll take it. So now the question is, is the Legendary edition worth it?

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The X-com Series can die in the thousand fires of Prosporo. I hate that series with all my soul. If it isn't the insanely difficult game play, its the blatant cpu cheating that goes on. Nope, F that entire series in the A. I'd rather shove shards of glass in my eyes than try to replay the originals.

Go, right now I just discovered that somehow, my junko laptop runs Mass Effect 1. Not sure how, but I'll take it. So now the question is, is the Legendary edition worth it?

Does that count xenonauts as well? It's basically x-com but better graphics and time units and maybe less frustration. I'm gonna guess yes that you still hate it.

I have never played Xenonauts before, I just remember the soul crushing experience of trying to make it past the first level of Xcom, and then I stupidly bought terrors of the deep, which was even harder.

Xcom was to videogames what Gary Guygax wanted DnD to be. A bitterly hard fight where you most likely died at every turn because you forgot some minute detail.

There's two things I find I really hate in very tactical games like Xcom or Fire Emblem

Critical Hits
Wide swinging random rolls


The problem with Critical Hits is that they take a regular hit that you'd tactically expect to take and cope with, and make it into a cripple or kill hit. It makes it very hard to plan and be aggressive and instead tends to force you to be overly defensive because whilst you could survive one or more characters attacking your unit, you can't bet on the critical not happening.


Wide swinging randoms - like Xcom can be a nightmare. It's when you've got that "90% to hit" chance and you miss - multiple shots in a row.




Both can feel like artificial difficulty because you can't plan or work with them; they are "do or don't" events that can make or break a moment and which can often be unavoidable unless you are playing heavily defensive in nature. Which is often not practical.

I do get that they add some risk and that they are an attempt to get around the fact that the human player can think and plan several turns ahead; whilst the AI generally can't do that; and where it can its sort of pre-scripted style thinking so its often easy for a human to spot the pattern and counter.
At the same time when you're playing Fire Emblem and your character dies to an enemy because of a lucky crit; or you're playing X Com and your shooter can't kill something that it should kill - and it spends several turns/rounds failing to kill them

There are a number of Infocom-style text adventures available for free online. A little searching should turn them up without too much trouble, if you're interested. Since they're all fan-made, some are stupid. But some have some really good writing.

And since they're text adventures, your video card (or lack thereof) is completely irrelevant.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
There's two things I find I really hate in very tactical games like Xcom or Fire Emblem

Critical Hits
Wide swinging random rolls

The game Phantom Doctrine might be worth a look if what you listed is your primary objection. It's got similarities with XCom, but the combat system doesn't work with percentages to hit or miss. Instead, every attack hits. But modifiers (such as cover) reduce the amount of damage that the target takes. So you generally have a pretty good idea exactly what will happen before you fire. Though since Phantom Doctrine is a Cold War stale beer and cigarettes espionage game, successful missions frequently involve no combat at all (something that I wish XCom 2 had allowed). I doubt it would run on Fezzik's computer, though.

I don’t know enough about the original xcom but xenonauts and xcom are definitely fair enough.

The point isn’t to absolutely depend on a few bunch of shots hitting and killing an enemy squad. The point is to understand what you can do if they and what the enemy can do if you don’t. It becomes like chess sorta in that respect probably where you have to figure out what the enemy can likely do.

Believe me I’ve played thousands of hours of vanilla xcom 2 and over a thousand of xcom eu. I know how to win on legendary Ironman runs. I’ve even done some Long War mod and won on 2nd hardest on Ironman. Long War is ridiculous. It’s a harder version of Xcom with more classes to figure out, more missions and a much more in depth global tactical section.

Xcom wasn't just critical hits, it was the AI getting PERFECT inputs for each action. That grenade into my guys each spaced out perfectly to avoid mass casualty weapons, ends up taking out 2-3 of my guys. That Sniper half way across the map with a 7% chance of hitting me ends up missing the intended target and head shotting my heavy weapons soldier that I've been saving up to build for the last 3 missions.

Every. Single. Tactical RPG does this from Xcom in the 90s to Wasteland 3 just released this year. Miss the target standing 5 feet away 3 times and have it head shot you first time. It reminds me of the difficulty slider built into early Arcade Fighting games where the first opponent is easy, second opponent is difficult, third opponent is literally cheating by putting out moves faster than you can (MK series and SF2 were famous for intentionally broken AI)

Alright fezzik you don’t have to play any xcom ever. I liked rebooted xcom personally. Other turn based strategy games vary from good to bad. I personally didn’t like chimera squad and as much as I liked gears tactics they had way too many side missions.

I think there a game an online friend plays. I think it was called Conquest of Elysium but I could be wrong.

I haven't actually played the rebooted ones, but it looks like a flashier version of the Wastland 2/3 style, tactical squad based ranged combat. I'd love to see a return to Fallout Tactics, which I feel got it much better. 76% to hit meant 3/4 shots would hit in your minigun blast. So in 40 shots 30 would hit, which is better than 76% chance to hit, full stop. Granted this caused much gnashing of teeth among the Fallout purists, but hey, it was well intended.

Right now I am taking the time to re-introduce myself to my PS2/N64 Rom collection.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

Every. Single. Tactical RPG does this from Xcom in the 90s to Wasteland 3 just released this year. Miss the target standing 5 feet away 3 times and have it head shot you first time

No, as I already explained up above, they don't all do that. Phantom Doctrine is an example of a tactical RPG that explicitly does NOT do that sort of thing.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:


Right now I am taking the time to re-introduce myself to my PS2/N64 Rom collection.

Sin and Punishment is a great run and gun for N64. I just use Retroarch and got a english patched rom. Works great. I'm having a blast playing the old ps1 era JRPGS again or for the first time.

Also love shumps so thats what most of my library is, I even got Akai Katana and Dodonpachi SaiDaioujou for mame working rather well.

I always enjoyed the 'sudden strike' series and the first couple of games don't like running on modern OS's so maybe worth a £2 spin of the roulette wheel on eBay?
The audio clips which trigger when directing your forces are still in my mind - i can't even spell them or say what they mean, but they have such panache it's worth playing the game for that alone.
Sudden strike made command and conquer look quite cartooney and the missions emulating real military actions got a huge expansion in the second game (sudden strike zwei!).
I never completed any of them but playing a mission where you are a lone dude with a mate in a jeep having to get past the Berlin wall being built before it's completely sealed was a mindblowing moment for me.
Maybe you'll find something you like too?

M.A.X is a must, one of the best turn based strategy games.

Then Fragile Allegiance and Comandos: behind enemy lines.

In the RPG department, Betrayal at Krondor and Betrayal in Antara.

Someone mentioned X Beyond the frontier, I rise you I-war, both of them if they run (first one should). True newtonian flight model with 4 axis stick rocks.