EasyLife

There are some video games with certain charisma. They stand out and are remembered for a long time. We talking Command and conquer, Duke Nukem, Bioshock, GTA IV and the latest jewel in this category – Portal.
Valve released the long-awaited Portal 2 in spring 2011 and it became an instant hit.

I couldn’t play it on my console cause my optical drive is long broken and I don’t have plans do fix it in the era of digital distribution. My PC is a 4-year old notebook with rather modest characteristics by modern standards: Core Duo T5250, ATI HD2400 and only 1gb of RAM. Which is enough for my needs, but not enough for modern games.
After half a year, I saw the PC version on a sale and decided to give it a try. To much astonishment (and joy), the game is running fast and beautiful at 800×600 (a 16:10 screen). Perhaps not as good as on high-end machines, but not worse than on consoles and – definitely – rather enjoyable.
I guess the reason is that most games are developed cross-platform nowadays, and those fancy console multicore RISC-processors are 5-6 old by now. Obviously, 4 years old x86 processors are able to compete with similar graphics performance.
So if you have an older PC which still can run any Source game (Counter-Strike 2, for instance), you are also able to play Portal 2 smoothly.

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