Top 10 Great PC Games That Your Computer Will Run

The Secret of Monkey Island

Alongside Grim Fandango, The Secret of Monkey Island is often heralded as the Holy Grail of PC adventure games. The writing is the holy water in the Grail, though; Guybrush Threepwood’s caption for the above image is simply “That’s the second biggest monkey head I’ve ever seen!” Seriously, this game is full of great one-liners similar to this one, and is a stickler for the adventure formula- make the puzzles as outlandish and crazy as possible. One of the most relentlessly funny games ever produced.

System Requirements:

MS-DOS 5.0 or higher: 386/33 DX, 1 Mb EMS, 256 color VGA/MCGA, SoundBlaster, Adlib, Roland MT 32. Basically, your computer can run this game.

World Of Goo

World of Goo serves as an example of a new market of games that even low-spec PC users can enjoy: Indie games. Indie games aren’t known for their graphical prowess, but rather for their often unique gameplay and attention to detail. World of Goo is a physics based puzzle game where you must build a tower out of bits of goo. It’s got all the makings of a great puzzle game: colourful and bright visuals, a catchy soundtrack, a deceptively simple mechanic, and little bits of what appears to be sewage. Actually, scratch that last point. That bit’s unique to World of Goo.

System Requirements:

Windows: 1.0 GHz or faster CPU, 3D Graphics Card, DirectX 9, 512MB RAM, 100MB hard drive space. One of the more demanding games on this list, but it shouldn’t cause too much trouble if you’ve got a modern PC.

Mac: OSX 10.4 or newer, 1.0 GHz or faster Intel or PPC processor, 512 MB or more RAM, 3D graphics accelerator, OpenGL 1.1 or newer.

Half-Life

Although this list is in no particular order, I decided to put Half-Life here, at the bottom. Why? Because, without all of the hyperbole I’ve poured into the descriptions of the other games, Half-Life is definitely one of the best games ever made. The total immersion that you have while you play, the feeling that you actually are Gordon Freeman, has only been matched by the sequel, Half-Life 2. All too often, when a game focuses on story, or level design, or the gunplay, the other areas suffer slightly. The massive amount of fine-tuning and polish put into Half-Life is evident from the fact that every one of these areas is top-notch. There’s a reason that people praise this game so much, you know; it really is something that everyone must play.

System Requirements:

Windows: Pentium 133 MHz, 24 MB RAM, SVGA video card, Windows-compatible sound card, 2x CD-ROM drive, 400 MB hard-disk space.

Well, there you have it. I went through a lot of options to get this down to just ten entries; there are a plenty of great games that can run on older machines. If your favourite isn’t on the list, feel free to leave a comment with a small explanation, and I’ll add them to the bottom of this post. Similarly, if you need help tracking down some of these old games, or can’t get them to run, feel free to email our team at editors [at] ripten [dot] com and we’ll be glad to help out.