Featured Game: Street Fighter X Mega Man

A disappointing resource hog

Year: 2012

Genre: Action + Platform

Recommend: Depends

Ah, nostalgia. Both the Street Fighter and Mega Man series have let their marks in gaming history. Now these two classics have come together with the collaboration of fans and Capcom. It's too bad that the game overloads most netbooks, even with its NES-style 2D graphics. On my netbook, the game runs at about 2 fps. Fortunately, higher-end netbooks can handle the game.

What you'll need

Reviews and Awards

While not the groundbreaking game of the century, by any imaginable means, the game has enjoyed largely positive reviews. IGN and Destructoid rated it a 7/10, saying the game is "solid" and "fun," but lacks replay value and a save system (version 2 of the game implemented a password system). GameRankings and Metacritic both give SFXMM a rating of approximately 71%. On the other hand, Edge magazine gave the game a 5/10, saying the level design is inconsistent and functionality is limited.

Tips

It's a little hard to give any tips when the game won't run at a tolerable speed. If you have a subpar netbook, don't bother with this game.

A pain to run in more ways than one.

An Introduction to the 2nd Generation Intel Atom Processors

Netbooks with a Pineview processor bear this sticker

The end of December 2009 brought the first of Intel's next wave of netbook processors. This time, they included a memory controller and the GPU built into the processor itself. The single-core CPU's (N4xx) were slightly faster than a Diamondville at the same clock speed, save for the N435. Intel also released dual-core Atoms (N5x0) that boosted CPU performance significantly. Unfortunately, the graphics processor, GMA 3150, in Pineviews were even weaker than the GMA 950's, with performance a bit better than a GeForce2 MX 400 (depending on the application). On the upside, the GMA 3150 can access 384 MB of system RAM, provides full MPEG-2 acceleration, and better OpenGL support. Users of Pineview netbooks are even more limited in gaming scope than those with a Diamondville, although both platforms can likely play the same games. Just keep graphical settings low on newer games and you'll be fine.