Looking for good indie games, preferably on steam

I have an aging PC, that I do not plan on upgrading for gaming purposes. What I would like to do, is start a collection of low requirements indie games to play on the system. Preferably on steam.

specs are

Dual core AMD cpu 1.3ghz

Shitty intigrated GPU

2gb of ram.

when it comes to indie games bundles are your best best. Keep an eye on Humble, Groupees, Indie Gala/Royale/Game Stand. They're cheap ways to get a bunch of great games, and the low entry cost means you aren't out much of anything should it not work on your PC

Desura has a lot more indie games and focuses more on them. For some reason Steam doesn't let a lot of them through greenlight for random reasons.

8bitbolt said:

I have an aging PC, that I do not plan on upgrading for gaming purposes. What I would like to do, is start a collection of low requirements indie games to play on the system. Preferably on steam.

specs are

Dual core AMD cpu 1.3ghz

Shitty intigrated GPU

2gb of ram.

Click to expand...

Optimize your rig as much as possible: Use something like Vista Services Optimizer to disable unneeded processes indefinitely. And it seems silly but the newest Game Booster is actually effective and can even grant you a performance improvement when not gaming, too.

In addition, summon the almighty Task Manager, switch to the "processes" tab, find your currently-running game's .exe (usually at the top) then right-click it and set its priority to HIGH. This resets when you close the game but you can download Prio which saves your priority.

One more: I recommend consistent use of Auslogics Disk Defrag. What distinguishes Auslogics is the gimmicky-sounding "optimize" feature -- it deftly sorts the contents of your HDD (moving everything towards the front to minimize gaps) like a neurotic bonobo with OCD who's coincidentally down with OPP.

Combining all these methods can drastically improve old rigs.

Some games can be deceptively demanding so watch out for those. Atom Zombie Smasher's levels consist of a single screen and its zombies = pink dots but you can't run that.

Pink dots.

There's plenty of good to great shit that can run on anything though (unless you're a Yesterday Person):

- PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era games are worth trying

- Spiderweb RPGs aren't pretty but they're massive and very good

- VVVVVV is remarkable. Dload Joy2Key with it for very simple controller mapping (my preference)

- Cave Story

- Escape Goat & Soul Caster 1 & 2 (maybe)

- Classics such as Fallout 1 & 2, Alpha Centauri, and Planescape Torment (check GOG.com)

- Fractal: Make Blooms Not War is unconditionally pretty

- Lumines

- NightSky

- The legendarily weak-hardware-friendly Plants vs. Zombies

- Civilization 3

- Tropico 1

- Torchlight 1

There are countless others but I'm done.

Holy detailed reply batman! Seriously though. Thanks for the replies. Maybe I can get some use out of this thing now.

The only thing I would add when going to look is to prioritize the time limited stuff like indie bundles and sales.

There's not much in the current Humble Bundle that would work well for a low end PC besides Populous, but there's two bundles on Groupees.com right now to look through (one with 5 days left and one with 9 days left) as well as Indiegamestand.com which rotates deals even 4 days.

Shinyloot.com is also supposed to be having a big sale soon.

Also for the next few hours if you hurry they have a promotion going on where you get $1 credit free by redeeming the code Z6N7T-8RP6M-H3BA3-LII6M at http://www.shinyloot.com/redeem but you do need to create an account there first of course.

If your PC is getting old, you should definitely visit gog.com. They have plenty of good games you can play on that rig.