My father-in-law recently bought a laptop. He has used it to Skype with us occasionally while we were in the States, and that was good. I think it help the kids get ready for the trip to Bolivia.
Now that we are here, we have been trying to help him set up the laptop: adding favorites to his web browser, creating a Facebook account, and adding games to his hard drive (so he doesn’t waste money playing internet games).
So far I have installed Angry Birds Rio, BillardGL (an open-source pool simulator), F1 2002 demo (auto racing), Pocket Tanks, Tuxracer, and the Jedi Knight II demo.
They are all fun games, and hopefully he’ll like them. The trickiest part will be leaving him notes so he remembers how to play. (Only the Billiards has a Spanish mode so far as I can tell).
I played JKII today with the kids while Yoli was El Jordán teaching a cake class. As I played, I realized that I did the same thing when I was in Bolivia 10 years ago. At that time I had a Pismo PowerBook G3 laptop with the same demo. Internet access then was just dialup, and even that wasn’t available in my room, so my gaming options were limited. I played that demo over and over.
Eventually I started using cheat codes to spawn massive battles between good and evil NPCs. I found that there was a huge arena-like area right under the landing platform at the beginning of the demo, which could be accessed using NOCLIP. I would turn on NOTARGET mode, spawn dozens of good guys, then spawn one bad guy — and watch the free-for-all begin. Very entertaining.
I did it again tonight, on Don Hector’s Windows 7 laptop. Still fun a decade later.
I wonder if he’ll enjoy the game as much as I did.