I have been a gamer for most of my life. Starting in the early days of consoles like the Intellivision and Colecovision, I have followed the advancement of games very closely to the modern era. Though I own the current generation of gaming consoles, I am a PC gamer at heart, with 3 steam accounts, one of which is now exceeding 800 games, most of which have been played and a good portion of which have been beaten.

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A common complaint amongst many of my friends is that they don't play games because they can't put them on their laptop to take with them. For the longest time, this was a legitimate complaint that held true pretty solidly, but that isn't the case anymore.

I can (and do) play Borderlands on my netbook.... No, I'm not bragging. Netbooks are pretty much bottom of the line. Even the newest netbooks ship with 'behind the times' parts to keep their energy consumption at a minimum. My Asus 1215T ships with an AMD dual-core processor (clocking 1.7GHz), 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and an ATi/AMD HD4250 video card. Though great for watching movies, especially if you are on a lightweight build of Linux, it's far from what most would consider a modern gaming system.

As those of you who have read my previous blogs know, I have 3 steam accounts, and I typically run the third on my netbook. It has such lightweight games as Cave Story, Cogs, and Home on it, but it also has Saints Row the Third, Saints Row 2, Borderlands, and Dead Island on it. Saints Row the Third absolutely will not run on a netbook, at least not on this one (until I upgrade the RAM to 4GB), but, on the other hand, Borderlands and Dead Island can both be played on their lowest graphical settings.

What's the point of playing these games at the bare minimum they have to visually offer? Because I am frequently on the road, and I demand some form of entertainment along the way. Due to seizures, I can't drive, which leaves me shotgun to some very long and very dull roadtrips for the various conventions my fiance and I attend. Who wouldn't want to murder random zombies or monsters on a long trip. The use of a 360 wired controller makes this much more enjoyable, freeing up my hands from the mouse and keyboard and making bumps on poorly maintained interstates much less of a concern.

It doesn't stop there, however. I have a number of older laptops, as well, including a Dell that I generally hate sporting a completely useless Intel 86845 video card that coughs at the mere thought of attempting to do something other than word processing...that is, until I installed Burnout Paradise on it.

Mind you, none of these games run at their full 30 frames per second targets (except Borderlands of the previously mentioned, weirdly enough), but that becomes a lot less important when your other laptops destroy the lighter socket fuse the moment you plug them in. In conclusion, before you just simply announce your computer is a useless paperweight that you needlessly spent $400+ on, perhaps you should give it a shot. You may just be surprised what your computer actually can handle.

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