We’ve had a lot of time from work recently due to circumstances which I’ll share at some point (not bad, pretty good actually), so there’s been more time to read and play video games. And you’ll notice from the ol’ “Read list” on the right side of the blog, I’ve been working through the 131 BattleTech books that I got last year from a Humble Bundle.

I love eBooks because they don’t take up more space on my shelves (after moving several times in the last decade, I’m only moving books that I love and want the physical copy of (sorry collected works of Mark Twain(I know the guy loved cats, but his books are available for free online))). I can read them on my Chuwi Minibook X 2 in 1, and I’m looking into serving them from the NAS server.

I, unfortunately, haven’t been playing as many video games because it’s tougher to do so. Rather, I’ve been playing the ever living bejeebus out of Terraforming Mars (which I got on Steam with ANOTHER Humble Bundle last year. So, when and if anyone plays Terraforming Mars with me, well I hope to put up a challenge at least.

That’s just to say this morning I tried loading up some BattleTech on the ol’ Minobook X. It’s an older game, but I enjoy it quite a lot and figured I’d give it a go and see if it works. I was not hopeful…this thing is using an N100 intel chip with the integrated graphics that it puts out. Sure it’s got 12 gb of RAM, and I replaced the SSD with a 1tb one…but it’s not made for games, let’s be honest.

I’ll also be honest: I was pleasantly surprised with the fact that the game worked. I turned all GFX settings down to the lowest, of course, but hey…it played smoothly, there was no delay in the action (I mean, it’s a turn based game, so there shouldn’t be), and it worked and played like it does on the desktop. I was just as pleasantly surprised when this laptop played Skyrim, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age games (except Veilguard, that one is too new…and too crappy to try to get it to work on this system).

Also, it made the laptop heat up significantly less than Terraforming Mars, which is really strange…considering one is a Turn Based action game with explosions, and one should be a pretty static board game. THAT I was really pleasantly surprised by.

Good times.