Netbooks are kicking up a storm these days, they’re given away with mobile broadband and mobile phone contracts left, right and centre, you can pick them up for as little as £149 (CnM miniBook) and every major, and not so major PC manufacturer seem to have at least one netbook in their line up.
So it’s no surprise that many people are looking for the right games to play on their shiny, new netbook is it?
This is the first in a multipart article that aims to offer up a few gaming choices for these low power machines, so make sure you check back regularly for more gaming gems for the netbook of your choice!
Audiosurf
Audiosurf has long been one of my favourite casual games, and it runs surprisingly well on netbooks.
The basic idea behind the game is that you match coloured blocks as you ride a track which varies in speed, incline and decline depending on the music track you have loaded. You pick the song from your music library, or choose one of the songs included with the game and the game engine creates the track based on the song, this makes each track unique!
It’s a great game to wile away the hours on a long train journey, and combines two popular pastimes – gaming and music!
However, to get the best out of the game you will need to turn the graphics settings down as low as you can, but that doesn’t really matter as the neon wireframes the game creates look very good at low resolutions. Also, it can take a bit of time to create a track the first time you load a song, but it only does this once per song so spend an hour or two preloading songs one day if you can. lastly, if your netbook has a small solid state drive (around 8GB) it would be a good idea to load your chosen songs from a USB flash drive to save space on your disk.
Audiosurf is available via Steam at £5.99, or you can get a boxed copy at Amazon.co.uk for around £3.50 (at time of writing).
The update does not provide any performance increase, but does however roll-up all patches since SP1.
