Featured Game: Portal

No Intel graphics for newbies

Year: 2007

Genre: Puzzle + Platform

Recommend: Depends

If you're a daring soul who loves to tweak and mod your netbook to get any game to work, you can probably get Portal up and running. If you're not, Intel's graphics won't cut it. Fortunately, Nvidia and AMD have made netbooks excellent Portal machines.

What you'll need

Reviews and Awards

Portal received excellent ratings all around the board, plus a big ol' list of awards, some of which are for GLaDOS's epic villianness (is that a word?). GameSpy stated "What Portal lacks in length, it more than makes up for in exhilaration." Metacritic ratings average 90/100, with GameRankings' rates very slightly different at 89.15%.

Tips

Go here for advice on Portal for Intel's graphics processors. Do it. It's in the description.

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