GAMERT (Gaming) Round Table

I'm posting this question on behalf of Helen Mandl, Secondary Teacher Librarian in Tanzania. She's looking for ways her school can participate in this year's International Games Day @ your library event, and I know GameRT members can offer helpful suggestions. Thanks!

We are a secondary school in Tanzania and would like to try some computer gaming. We have three older computers and internet access that is not always available. Could you recommend some computer games that could be downloaded for free and loaded onto these computers. Something that doesn't need high end memory, latest operating system etc.

It would be good to have something where there was a score or time at the end so we could have a competition amongst students to see who got the best time/score etc. Something that both boys and girls would enjoy and that didn't take too long for each competitor to complete.

Due to our computer limitations, we haven't really gotten into any computer gaming but would like to try it out on this day.

I am seeing some success with Remnant Knights from Funimation among the teens. Its a free MMORPG that is anime themed. It requires less CPU power than minecraft.

Of course, that would require internet connection. not the best option then. What is the operating system and age of the computers? You might want to consider using Reddit to reach out to people who own old games. They might be able to mail you the discs for things that our purchase and Dl only now. I'm sure some of them have multiple copies of Warcraft II and III.

Also, if you can go cheap, you can buy for DL from good old games. They are cheap, and you should be able to find something to run on your OS

Haha, my immediate reaction to this was that it should be posted on Reddit, and then people would just send games.

Of course without some idea of what sort of specs the computers have it's hard to suggest things.

What about some variety of snake? It's a classic, and I'm sure there are freeware versions floating out there that can be installed on even ancient computers.

And it's addictive!!

On a similar note, there are a number of light-cycle games (a la the movie Tron) that are free, and even worked on the old Linux computers in my high school library (back in the '90s).  Almost always a hit both for local network and solo play.

I'd recommend Tetris or something along those lines. There are plenty of freeware versions out on the internet, and if you use a linux based OS you could actually download them from their download manager. A good website to look at is http://sourceforge.net/ where you can fine a variety of opensource software. Hope this helps.