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PC Gaming Suggestions for Console-like Fun?
jayminer writes "We are a relatively newly married young couple who enjoy spending our spare time at home. We don't own a console but have a gaming laptop with DVI output to play games on our TV. My wife is also a CS major so she's computer literate enough. She does not like strategy games, MMORG or any other role-playing game. Apart from "Find the Sausage" jokes, we need quality gaming advice, preferably games which we can play with a single laptop connected to a single large screen, with two gamepads, a console-like experience. What are your suggestions?"
Lego Star Wars 1&2 can be played on PC with either keyboard or controller and has a good co-op function. You can probably find a torrent of it easy enough.
Gametap.com. I like that. Go to walmart and buy a controller adapter for usb and you can both play games, old and new, arcade and console, from your laptop.
a head designer was the guy who coined the term mmorpg. it is in fact the first (graphical, sorry mudders) example of an mmorpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(computer_game)
its like the original asteroids, without the asteroids, and instead a maze of a bunch of other ships (random people from around the world)
i think a lot of slashdotters messed with it 10 years ago, and forgot about it
however, i recently rediscovered it (its free now) and was surprised to find a lot of zones still heavily populated. each zone has a different variation on the basic ship types and their abilities. you can waste 5 minutes or half an hour on it, to great effect
nothing like meeting a guy in a tank from finland, dodging his mine, blowing him away, while a guy from china materializes out of cloak and shoots you in the back. its cheap and easy mmorpg fun without the massive time commitment something like WoW demands
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Coming soon too we have LEGO Raiders of the Lost Ark and such. It's amazing how fun that game is, especially with a competent second player.
However, play it with a five year old, my god, you'll go insane. It's like playing Contra all over again.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Ep1-3 and 4-6 are both excellent and are PC-available.
I think guitar hero has a PC port, if you're into rhythm games. (ba-dum-ching!)
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I would suggest emulators.
For arcade games, you can use MAME
http://mamedev.org/
Once you've got MAME, you need a set of current ROM files for it. You can find ROMs on BitTorrent or on any P2P application.
As MAME evolves, the ROM sets get replaced with new and better extractions, so you'll want a piece of software to manage them.
ClrMAMEPro is a tool that will use the data files from the latest version of MAME, and scan a big huge mess of old ROM files, extracting whatever is useful from them into a nice, neat set that works with the current version
http://www.clrmame.com/
To get yourself set up, download any new or old MAME ROMs you can find, then use ClrMAMEPro to make a proper and current set out of them and burn it to backup.
There are also emulators floating around out there for Playstation, Nintendo 64, NES and Super NES. I've gotten good performance out of Project 64, an emulator for Nintendo 64. MarioCart plays quite well.
When you're choosing GamePads, you should look for something wireless that has as many buttons as you can possibly find. You want to be able to map the controller you choose to every possible controller from history, so you're going to need something that is flexible.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since the post talks about what games the misses dislikes, I'll do my best with that even though no insight about what she does like was provided. Worms Armageddon is a seriously fun game anyone can play. It's an old game, and I want to say there is some hacked version that can run at higher resolutions than it was originally capable of handling, so I would suggest buying the game and looking into that. Also, I would recommend looking into emulators for NES, SNES, and so on. There is a ton of stuff out there for that which could provide a wide variety of games that are tons of fun to play (even if the graphics are far from top-notch).
Even though you can't go spit-screen on this one, if either or both of you likes racing games, GTR2 is a seriously good racing simulator, but keep in mind that the average person might find its realistic physics to be frustrating. The Logitech Momo force-feedback steering wheel works exceptionally well for this and other racing games.
If the misses also likes diablo-style games, Titan quest is a game my wife enjoyed. Again, you can't go split-screen here, but it could provide some good entertainment for both of you. Of course, if you have another PC in the house, you could play together over a LAN. ^_^