Featured Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Plays on the same hardware as SoC

Year: 2008

Genre: First-Person Shooter, Survival Horror

Recommend: Depends

If you can run S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl on your netbook, you'll be happy to know that its prequel, Clear Sky, will run on exactly the same hardware. The minimum system requirements for the game are unchanged, although it takes more juice to run the game with more eye candy, like volumetric light and fire, DirectX 10 support, and fancy weather effects. If you enjoyed the first game, it wouldn't hurt to give Clear Sky a try, and flex some GPU muscle in the process.

What you'll need

Reviews and Awards

Clear Sky earned some mixed reviews; on average, the game is the worst-rated in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The best rating came from GamesTM, with a 90/100 for "transform[ing] grim fantasy into a startlingly real-world experience." On the other hand, X-Play wasn't so kind, awarding Clear Sky a 60% for its boring environments, numerous bugs, and antiquated gameplay. GameSpot nominated the game for Best Atmosphere in 2008, but it was shot down by Dead Space.

Tips

OK, I'll admit it. There's no netbook out there that meets Clear Sky's recommended requirements.  I suggest starting off at medium settings at your netbook's native resolution, then tweaking settings from there.

Sunbeam effects; thanks, Wikipedia

AMD Makes Small Improvements to Brazos 2.0 Line

Before they unleash their Temash and Kabini platforms (more on that in a future post), AMD has released some small upgrades for their current-gen Brazos 2.0 platform. The new processors, the E1-1500 and E2-2000, are direct replacements to the existing E1-1200 and E2-1800, respectively.  Compared to the E1-1200, the E1-1500 gets a speed boost of 80 MHz (1.48 GHz vs 1.4), which is hardly noticeable. The GPU also gets a small push of 29 MHz (529 MHz vs 500). You might notice this difference, but it's not enough to get you playing any new games. On the high end, the E2-2000's CPU is 50 MHz faster than its predecessor (1.75 GHz vs 1.7 GHz); again, insignificant. The GPU gets clocked up to 700 MHz over the previous 680 MHz. Both new processors retain the RAM speeds of the procs they replace (DDR3/1066 for E1-1500, DDR3/1333 for E2-2000).

On the whole, these new platform bumps are nothing to be excited about. If all other factors are the same, however, there's no reason to buy a netbook/laptop with the older processors. If you need a computer soon (i.e. you can't wait for the next generation), now's a good time.

Featured Game: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

Tweaking necessary

Year: 2010

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Recommend: Ehh.....

There's just no way around it; StarCraft II is a heavy game for netbooks. Even with the most powerful netbook out there (A6-5200-powered), tweaking might still be required to get the game to run smoothly. Once you do, though, the reward is well worth the effort.

What you'll need

Before you even attempt to run StarCraft II, you have to meet certain requirements. For starters, 2 GB of RAM is absolutely necessary, unless you're running an ION 2 platform on Windows XP. You'll need a dual-core CPU from the following list: Atom N550, N570, N2600, or N2800; AMD C-60, C-70, E-300, E-350, E-450, E1-1200, E1-1500, E2-1800, or E2-2000. If you don't have to tweak anything, consider yourself fortunate.

Reviews and Awards

 StarCraft II has been highly praised from every direction: story, gameplay, multiplayer, graphics, and more. The game scored around 93% on the aggregator sites GameRankings and Metacritic, and received 10/10 or equivalent ratings from at least 4 sources. However, some have criticized the game for its lack of LAN multiplayer support.

Tips

"Well," you say, "I don't know how to tweak a game!" Fear not, it's not that difficult. See this site for assistance.

Screenshot from the StarCraft Wiki

Featured Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Low-end netbooks won't cut it

Year: 2007

Genre: First-person Shooter + Survival Horror

Recommend: Depends





















 You know those old classics everyone loves that can run on anything? Well, this isn't one of those games. Fortunately, you can still play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on a netbook, but it can't be one of those sub-$300 ones.

What you'll need

Reviews and Awards

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. won GameSpot's Best Atmosphere award from Best and Worst of 2007. Reviews were generally positive; Eurogamer called it "one of the scariest games on the PC". However, it was criticized for its various bugs and mediocre story.

Tips

Since all netbook GPU's support D3D 9, you might as well enable some kind of dynamic lighting. Both Nvidia's and AMD's GPU's can handle it.

Screenshot from Wikipedia

Featured Game: Vindictus

You can play it if you have the right hardware

Year: 2010/2011, depending on region

Genre: Fantasy MMORPG

Recommend: Depends

Best MMO nomination at E3 2010? Best free-to-play MMO of 2010? Playable on a netbook? Yes, yes, and yes. Oh, and did I mention it's free? Vindictus is a great game for netbooks, if yours has the chops.

What you'll need

Reviews and Awards

Besides its nomination for best MMO at E3 2010, Vindictus has received other praise for its graphics and action. IGN awarded Vindictus as the "Best Free-to-Play MMO Game of 2010". "Ever wondered whether or not it would be satisfying to break a pillar in half and smash one of those halves into the face of a giant wolf-man?" MMO Hut gave Vindictus an Excellent rating for its "great skill and attack animations" and other positive features. Vindictus got dinged a little for its repetitive combat and limited choice of playable characters.

Tips

Having trouble playing? Open up the Task Manager and kill all processes you can do without, using End Process. In extreme situations, this might even include Windows Explorer. Killing Explorer isn't as dangerous as it sounds; you can always use Task Manager to restart it if needed.

Screenshot from MMO Hut

An Introduction to AMD's Second-Gen Fusion Processors: Brazos 2.0

In this lovely month of June, AMD rolled out the successor to Zacate, Brazos 2.0. Not much is new in this release, merely higher speeds. The E1-1200 is meant to replace the E-300, bumping up the CPU speed by 100 MHz and the GPU by 12 MHz. For some reason AMD downgraded the memory controller in the E1-1200 to DDR3-1066 instead of DDR3-1333, like the E-300 had. The E-450 has been upgraded by the E2-1800, with a 50 MHz increase in the CPU clock. The GPU has been pushed up to 523 MHz without boost and 680 MHz with boost. These are 3 and 13% gains, respectively. AMD chose to keep the DDR3-1333 memory controller here. Overall, Brazos 2.0 is not much of an improvement, but if cost is not a factor, there's no reason to buy an older Zacate machine.