heh, I have Superbook for the exact same purpose! (for the uninitated: it was a “laptop” which used your phone/tablet/etc as the tech, it was basically just a 1080p screen and keyboard for a phone).

Mine took 3-4 factory resets and firmware flashes to get working, and then the damn thing gave up the ghost the same night and hasn’t worked since… not that it has any real use anyway. Good buy /s

Steam would know best.

indeed!

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

seems like 16 GB ram and 8 GB vram is the most popular setup.

Also, wasn’t the ram upgradeable in the gabecube?

depends. high refresh rate is great if you play fast moving games. The difference is pretty much “same” as 30->60 when going from 60 to 120, for example. After seeing something at eg. 120 fps, “60 feels like 30, kinda” - just a personal observation.

For turn based 4x games, isometric rpg’s etc, probably won’t make much of a difference.

FPS, racing, etc fast? yea, it’s great.

edit: if you’re a movie enthusiast, 144 Hz screen might make sense if you watch a lot of stuff which is 24 fps. As 144 (and 120, for that matter) divide evenly with 24, making the tiny judder go away compared to 60 Hz screen.

portal 3

afaik youtube promotes you more based on viewed minutes. So longer viewing per video -> more pushing to frontpage.

well, if we’re sticking to scummvm, they offer some free games on their site: https://scummvm.org/games/#games

the freebies are in general fairly old (like early-to-mid 90’s dos stuff), but work fine on scummvm, hence they’re offering them there. AFAIK all of them are controlled by mouse only.

Not all of them are suitable for all ages though.

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a story set in 40’s, about a pilot for hire and his small plane crashing into the amazons while transporting a movie star. Overall theme is cartoony/goofy/comedy, with a bit of juvenile humour ( by modern standards). There are some things some could find unsuitable for children, I guess.

• rubber breasts, used in non-sexual way to build a costume to fool gangsters
• the “bad guys” are essentially ww2 germans (but not referred as such, iirc their faction isn’t even given a name, I think)
• some alcohol & tobacco references
• very mild innuendos.

Beneath a steel sky - postapocalyptic oppressive world, although a bit cartoony/comical and oddly british considering the story takes place in australia. Banger adventure game but does contain few violent deaths. I played this during my early teens, but I wouldn’t suggest letting very young kids have a go at this.

The rest of the games on there I either haven’t played or can’t recommend.

But, since you asked for games for kids to learn to use mouse, I suspect the kids in question are like 5-7? These 2 games aren’t probably for them yet.

If you want to just, remove steam from the equation, eg. for no-internet kids’ computer:

basically: buy them from steam, then just install them. Then, just copy the game files somewhere else, install scummvm & add the games to scummvm to play them.

Scummvm is just an app which runs these older adventure games on wide variety of systems, incl modern windows (the games are occasionally so old, windows doesn’t support them natively at all). Scummvm is fairly straightforward to set up, basically just click “add game” -> browse to where the game is -> ok -> it is now in scummvm, click “Play” to play it.

If you’re asking about “yar har har, me mateys, and a bottle of rhum” -methods, that’s an excercise left for the reader.

ye. ended up checking some of the games’ store pages. There’s a note about scummvm.

Dunno if they keep the scummvm updated though, not that it matters much unless there’s an issue with a specific game. IIRC Indy Atlantis is bundles with decade+ old scummvm, though it’s been a while since I checked.

yea I saw that. And the comment was from months ago. The author has had plenty of time to set even the most minimal of descriptions, anything really, but hasn’t.

the author really didn’t put any effort towards screenshots, description… anything.

~10 min gameplay, 1.2 GB… seems like a lot of assets for very little gameplay.

Bit sketchy, if you ask me.

depends on the age of your kids, buuuut: if they’re fairly young, maybe spyfox/putt-putt/pajama-sam/freddi-fish games? those can be found on eg. steam, and should run fairly painlessly from there. (and if you want to make them steam-free/offline, you can just copy the files from those games elsewhere and use eg. scummvm (https://scummvm.org/) to run them. But that’s entirely optional & up to you)

Basically they are point & click adventure games aimed for younger kids. I’m in my 40’s and kinda do enjoy spyfox as well x)

The games are fairly old (afaik mid-to-late 90’s, or so), so graphics are fairly low res by today’s standards, but they’re essentially just playable cartoons with mild puzzles, all dialogue is spoken (subtitles are an option) and no real fail states.

man, the mention of printed-faq’s opened a core memory. I had One Must Fall 2097 and Mortal Kombat move-lists printed out

I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3

if I’m stuck in a game (usually some 90’s point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.

It’s probably a windows-thing, and it’s been quite a while since I last played it (seems like it was when win7 was still a thing), but I don’t think there’s been updates to it. Could be the sound issue I had was specific to some audio hardware or settings.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne#Issues_fixed has some audio fixes listed, but it’s been quite a while and I can’t remember the exact issue, but the audio was entirely “borked” without the fix.

Haven’t tested the game on linux yet.

the last time I played MP1 I had to tinker with some fanpatches to even get audio working. While it wasn’t a massive ordeal, would be nice if it worked on modern systems out-of-the-box.

No worries, my comment was a bit ambiguous.

up to personal taste, to me it’s mostly about implementation. All motion blur isn’t terrible, but when it’s terrible, it’s really bad. Some older games had really odd stepping in it, or everything had a trailing blur of same length regardless of how fast the objects were moving, or motion blur is calculated at different fps/shutter speed than the game runs so the blur is either too long/short/fucky.

Mostly I’m about the fov being the dealbreaker here. My eyes start to hurt with narrow fov’s, feels like I’m straining something somehow. I usually go with something between 90-100, 110 in some rare cases.

edit:

oh, maybe I misunderstood the question: I mean, I agree it’s a dealbreaker. Just “FFS”'ing because it’s not an option.

ye. they tend to be.

Kinda funny that the review header states they had 0.1 hours in the game at review time - so they knew exactly what they were getting, still bought it - and have played over 9 hours after it. Like… why?

Just to get early in with the rage reviews and farm steam reactions?

Seen few videos about this, the game seems like decent-ish action adventure with Vampires, less like a rpg.

Might pick this one up when it gets to -50% sales or so.

edit: from the user reviews:

Why does this game need Paradox Launcher?

but seems like it can be circumvented, at least peeps with gog version seem to be doing so.

Why is there no Motion Blur toggle?

Why is there no FOV slider?

… oh ffs.

Why are there no basic accessibility options in 2025?

they didn’t detail what this means.

EDIT: for clarity, it’s amazing that motionblur/fow are not available options. Wasn’t criticizing the review, these are valid points.

But I’d like to know what accessibility options were omitted as well.

I loved this game, up until the difficulty ramped up quite hard and I just couldn’t proceed. Could be a classic issue of gidgud, but the shift was quite sudden, iirc. It’s been quite a while since I last played (early 2021, around ~13 hours, according to steam).

The game looks absolutely lovely, that style is absolute peak.