Searching for the perfect time waster on 8MB of video card memory

I have spent the last few weeks feverishly searching for the perfect game to play on my ThinkPad T20 from IBM. I love my ThinkPad from its perfectly positioned pushable keyboard to its bright large screen and center mouse button - the one I used to hate with a passion previously reserved for ex-boyfriends.
My ThinkPad is not the most powerful laptop on the market - no bells and whistles; just a solid, hard-working machine that does what I want, when I want without questions or crashes.

Until I decided I wanted a game.

First I tried the old platformer jump-and-runs - they worked ok. Buzz Redhead is perfect and I thought that was the one I wanted... until I started to see some of the newer jump-and-runs with 3-D color-saturated graphics and fat adorable characters. These showed me my ThinkPad had some limits - primarily with its Savage IX video card with only 8MB memory.

I hadn't even thought about it until now and now that I've thought about it, I can't think about anything else.

So I have devoted at least hundreds of very obsessive minutes to my quest for a pretty game that will run on an 8MB video card.

Hah! No easy feat, that.

For a while I thought perhaps I just needed a different handheld experience. I tried a friend's PSP, but that wasn't the solution, as interesting as it would have been to play around with all the fascinating homebrew. Then I thought a Nintendo DS Lite - cause I have a GameCube that I adore (but rarely play because it's isn't very portable). Then I went back to the PocketPC (it was actually my Blackberry that started all this, but that's another story).

I found a wonderful game called spb Air Islands for the Pocket PC - a small strategy, simulation game where you help rebuild a magical world that was destroyed when one of their Gravitors failed. For some reason this game completely grabbed my attention, and I found myself wishing for a larger canvas (wry look - can we say envelope pushing?!). Anyway, I started where most people would start today - SimCity.

In all my newfound, hardware neophyte innocence, I tried to run SimCity 4 on my ThinkPad.

Suffice to say, that didn't go too well, but when I tried to run Outpost Kaloki (which should technically have worked) and it grabbed all my system resources, crashed the laptop in an entirely ungraceful fashion and informed me my opengl drivers were out of date, I knew I had a problem.

So then I did a little reading about the Savage IX graphics card. Ugh. I decided not to try and learn everything there is to learn about updating this driver and went with the last 2003 driver update from Lenovo. I haven't dared try Outpost Kaloki again, though.

After much rummaging around, I found some interesting posts about a game called Startopia. Most of these posts advise that the anything past the demo of this game is difficult if not impossible to find.

That's where the guys at http://www.free-game-downloads.mosw.com/ come in. They have the ONLY full version of Startopia available for download that I was able to find (and I'm pretty obsessive). You can find the full download of Startopia here:

http://www.free-game-downloads.mosw.com/abandonware/pc/strategy_games/games_so_sy/startopia.html

I'm going to give it a try now and will pop back and let you know how it goes.