Red Faction, a great first-person shooter for the Acer Aspire One (or any other) netbook

Dec 3rd, 2009 at 11:42 am
filed under: Gaming / Netbook Games

I grabbed this game from Direct2Drive for under $10 recently and I have to say, though I'm not super big into first-person shooters, this game is kick ass. Not only does it play well on the Aspire One, it's got some really cool features, like blowing through walls with explosives (an example in the video below), manning submarines and machine guns, pretty ground-breaking for an FPS released in 2001.

The game installed just fine on my 8.9" Aspire One AOA-150, it runs very nicely @ 800x600 with all the settings on high. I ran a FRAPs benchmark for 3 minutes and got the following results;

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
3458	180000		10	32	19.211

Not bad at all, certainly playable... I didn't notice any hiccups, and one can always turn down the settings if desired.

The only caveat to this game was the fact that there is no savegame folder created by default... on Windows 7 at least (and I imagine Vista is the same)... so I had to create a folder called "savegame" within the Red Faction game folder. Then I had to set the executable to "run as administrator" so it would save the games to the folder. To do this, simply right click on your desktop icon, select properties, and then compatability, as in the picture below;