Adventures in Netbook Gaming: Torchlight

By Fraser McMillan

The Steam Christmas sale, or, as I prefer to call it, “Annual Bank Account Video Game Holocaust”, is always a great place to net some bargains. Shamefully, to the detriment of some great developers, I can hold off until then to purchase a game at a knock-down price. In this case, the losers were Runic with their latest release Torchlight, and the reduction was 75 per cent.

A couple of months ago, before my beloved PC broke, I played the Torchlight demo on the repeated recommendation of the late, great Idle Thumbs podcast. Everything they’d said about it was correct – smoothly put together, insanely playable and just, in general, an thoroughly nice experience. It’s Diablo meets Nickelodeon with all the slick presentation and options of a modern day PC game. If you want, though, it can be Diablo meets Nicktoons Racing – all fuzzy visuals and low resolution cartoon stylings.

This is because Torchlight has a “Netbook Mode”. I had obviously never tried it when playing on a decent gaming rig, AA cranked all the way up and the monitor’s MagiColour on – “lush” is not the word – but because the Steam sales (ABAVGH, for short) came along not weeks after its graphics card bit the dust, I was forced to resort to the little Samsung NC10 in the corner and give it a crack.

//When I’m sixty-four
Nintey seconds. That’s how long it took to load the menu.

Ninety seconds.

In real life, it’s not too much at all. The average toilet trip or cup of tea is roughly in the same ball park time-wise, and those everyday happenings don’t frustrate us or even feel like time consuming. For a game, though, ninety seconds is an age. Wait! Let me rephrase that: ninety seconds is an aaaaaaaaaaaage.

So what did I do? Make a cup of tea, naturally. I sat down in the kitchen, the only place in the house to use the dinky wee thing and its peripherals without sucummbing to unbearable back spasms. The menu appeared, and it all looked rather spiffy for such a poor monitor. Though a tad washed out, the bright colours still shone through and even as I entered character selection the framerate held firm. Choosing the alchemist (whom I named Fraser, after myself) and a pet dog (Lenin, after my favourite political figure), I entered town and began clicking. Oh I clicked and clicked. Click some more, though, I did not, for I had encountered the Shitty Wizard and began laughing uncontrollably. Again, Idle Thumbs.

Anyway, I was surprised. This was definitely still Torchlight. Some of the text may have been a little small for its own good and the framerate was far from buttery smooth, but the experience was largely unchanged. Entering the dungeon was a similar story – far from ideal, but certainly playable. Ploughing through some low-level dross, though, it became evident that if the dips in framerate became more common it could grate.

//Like sandpaper
And grate it did. I hung in there for half an hour or so, still enjoing my time shootin’ and lootin’, but being steadily ground down by the spluttering mess the action descended into during encounters with several enemies at once. Getting clicks in became a challenge in itself, and a normal tactical move like, you know, running away, was rendered impossible, often leaving me impotently hammering away at an empty corner of the screen as the scene jumped fifteen yards to the left. Such slowdown only occurred three or four times, but it was enough to put me off. I’ve since returned to the game a handful of times, and though the performance hasn’t improved during these sections, it’s the kind of thing that becomes almost tolerable in the same way I found Mario 64 running at half speed on a PSP in 2006 tolerable enough to waste an entire weekend on, so that definitely shouldn’t stop you.

For any ageing Diablo fans who haven’t the time to invest in proper gaming PCs anymore or even existing Torchlight players wanting a fix on the move, consider this a tentative recommendation. Though its performance is admittedly slightly lacking, it squeezes an incredible amount from the mobile graphics chip and fairly well translates to smaller machines. Applause to Runic for including the mode – here’s hoping that others follow suit.

Next week: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis