My boss wants to multiplayer on the laptops at work...

[UnSub]

... and wants me to pick some games that would work. We've both got Intel dual cores @ 2.1 GHz with 2GB of RAM, using Windows Vista (Business) SP1. Neither laptop has a separate graphics card, which I think basically screws us. He is interested in FPSs, remembering back to his days playing Quake and Doom.

Any recommendations? I'm trying to push him down the road of getting an Xbox 360 since the office could use a dedicated DVD player and it would play games released in the last 3 years.

[Trippy]

Need to know the chipset. If it's something like a FSM-forsaken Intel GMA 950 you might be able to run Half-Life 2 engine games at very reduced quality but with something slightly better than slideshow FPS.

[Bungee]

I think quake 4 has enough room in the graphics department to run it on virtually everything. And your Boss seems to like quake anyway so why not go for that?

[fuser]

Run gpu-z to give us an indication of what kinda GPU is in the laptops.

[UnSub]

Need to know the chipset. If it's something like a FSM-forsaken Intel GMA 950 you might be able to run Half-Life 2 engine games at very reduced quality but with something slightly better than slideshow FPS.

The display adapter is:

Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family

[Trippy]

Well the good news is that the X3100 GPU in your laptop is better than the GMA 950. The bad news is that it's not that much better. Intel finally figured out how to do hardware T&L a decade or so after all the other GPU companies which helps in theory but their implementation is incredibly screwy and some games actually run slower with it turned on.

You can Google for some benchmarks but if you run at 1024x768 (or even lower) and are willing to deal with any strange scaling artifacts your panel might have (some panels are better than others at displaying non-native resolutions) you should be okay with some of the older shooters.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4154

http://www.computerbase.de/news/treiber/mainboards/intel/2007/oktober/benchmarks_intels_grafik_treibervergleich

[UnSub]

Thanks Trippy.

... I might still try to convince him about the 360 though...

[Stephen Zepp]

You could try Legions on instantaction, but with that chip set, plus being behind a corporate firewall, your mileage will vary highly.

I do want to stand firmly in support of Trippy's assessment of the hardware. That chipset family is the bane of most game engine's existence. Even with a detailed auto-profiler implementation, the card reports incorrect supported feature sets (basically, it lies about what it can do), so trying to get games to run on it is totally hit or miss.

[Sky]

That chipset family is the bane of most game engine's existence.

QFT

The gaming industry needs a lobby. Start by suing intel for the GMA.

[UnSub]

He bought Crysis for his home PC and asked if it would run in the office. I told him I didn't think so. 

[Sky]

I wish I was that kind of boss, some days.

My fondest desire for our library computers would be putting WoW on them, but the logistics are a nightmare (I ran it by our legal). Poor bastards playing Runescape. Poor bastards.

[Nerf]

How exactly are the logistics a nightmare?  People still need their own accounts to play, you're just providing them another place to login and play.

[Sky]

You know how kids get when they share accounts. They'll blame us, their parents get all pissed. There may not be much legal standing, but there's bad publicity. And we're in real dire straits right now, can't afford angry patrons. Maybe nightmare is overstating it.

I would love to schedule a group night where we shut down our computer lab and let six kids group up.