Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

If it were actually the mid 2000s, I'd be okay for an insane amount of time with just Flash and Audacity. Today, probably the first Baldur's Gate.

Oo or an snes emulator with Shadowrun.

Windows XP pinball

Lemmings.

Nothing else. 😛

Dark Disciples 1 and 2, including the temple of eternity module.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dark-disciples-43a

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dark-disciples-2-43b

Zsnes and a few roms

12 hours isn't really even that long, could probably bring just about anything, but I think Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would be a great way to spend that time.

Install the gta 3d games need for speed most wanted 05 and music from 80s to the 90s

The brother bear game

Age of Empires 2... See you in 12 hourse ✌️

Quake and Doom. Maybe binge some shows. Mid 2000s PCs are plenty powerful for a lot of tasks/entertainment.

Only 12 hours? LoTR extended edition.

Twelve hours? Easy, civ 3. Spent 14 hours on it last Friday? Sunday? Not working for a week makes it all a blur lol

Maybe throw in ultra Lionel train town or hype the time quest if I want variety. Good reminder to look at some stuff I haven't thought about in awhile ngl.

Factorio

EZPZ

Dwarf Fortress. I used to play it on the weekends as a kid when I was stuck with my stepmom's old computer from 2000.

VLC and The Wire. It's been a while since I did a rewatch.

A complete collection of QI episodes, and I'd be able to watch a fraction of them 😊

Stardew valley

MS Paint, an old clip art CD, and notepad. It's time to make some unbearable personal websites

Not sure 12 hours is enough time for me to grab much. Perhaps my backlog.

Extreme Warfare Revenge, an old wrestling management game, has always been one of my go-tos for situations like this.

Stuck? Sounds more like a gift to me.

I'd probably not waste any time and play minesweeper

Porn

I'd copy my Doom and Quake folders, hoping the modern sourceports still work on them. Well, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should both work. Then all my emulators up to the 32-bit era, some music and the seasons of Kamen Rider and Ultraman that I'm currently watching.Honestly I could just bring my actual external hard drive or my HP laptop from 2013 that I installed Linux on. It's what I got on those.

warcraft 3, sid's pirates, civ 3 or 4. portable of vlc for some classic 90's anime.

StarCraft, warcraft 2, HL, Portal, doom 1-2, Simpsons doom, quake 1-2, command and conquer series, Dune, NES emulator and the full game library zip.

I probably don't need that many but yeah.

Some retro computer emulators(Atari 8-bit, C64) and my dev environment for them - when you target old stuff you can customize the whole dev tooling setup with very little compromise, especially if you go the route of assembly/Basic/Forth and then pile on higher level build steps. I'd have to be careful around the potential problem of "whoops there's a 64-bit binary in there and I'm on a 32-bit OS".

Basically if I were back in college it'd be that all the time, and then VLC and some anime or movies in 480p. No sense in keeping up with those darn 2000's games.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 or possibly OpenRCT2 (depending on whether or not it works on the hardware)

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction

Civilization 4, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White just to name a few. See you next year. :p

Silent Hunter III

Sink some tonnage.

FTL: Faster Than Light would run on a computer that old, yeah? Probably bring that and a couple animes to watch while I play it.

Oh shit, if it's XP then I'd be good just playing pinball for the full 12 hours

This is a fun question!

So, in the mid 00's I worked for a pretty large software company doing mid level tech support for enterprise customers. One unassuming weekday, we get a notice that the building is going in to lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out.

Not long after we're told to contact our families and anyone that may be depending on us after work. There's a communication stating "we have a strong reason to believe anthrax was released in the building and no one is leaving until the CDC takes a sample and tests it". Awesome.

After the initial chaos wears down the dawning realization that there are a few hundred (well closer to a thousand of us) now stuck in a multi- building complex with fuck all to do sets in. This is before YouTube really had anything and Netflix was barely serving up a few streaming movies. Plus, there's no way I'm installing Silverlight on my production box. Dark times indeed.

In a stroke of pure luck, I stil had a couple of burned "backups" in my backpack from the previous weekends LAN party (jesus, this story just keeps getting more and more ancient).

A few short moments later and the ISO's were dumped and it was game time. Now, we were all saddled with Dell Optiplexes of some random flavor (620's maybe... this was pushing 20 years ago, details are a little sketchy) so there wasn't much we could really run but anything in a pinch, yeah?

Long story long, I'd spend that time playing C&C Renegade, Quake 3 Unreal Tournament and maybe speed run Duke3D one more time. All while listening to some flavor of Scandinavian metal to truly flesh things out. If that got boring, I'd likely watch Ricky-O again or maybe throw on whatever else I happened to have dumped at the time (likely something from Tartan Asia Extreme or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Despite what an utter shit show this moment was, I have so many vivid memories of playing those games on the test network with a bunch of other 20 something people barely navigating through life while being scared to death that we may never see our families again.

That and trying to teach Ted how to copy a crack to the install folder... again... wtf man, directions are right there in the readme.nfo