Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Linux and a bunch of ebooks. Maybe Larn and Nethack.

probably some snes roms, an emulator, and some ebooks

Fallout 1&2 obviously, and stay trapped for the next month or so

Or morrowind if it can handle it

Nothing I can explore the PC for 12 hours. Sounds like fun. Maybe play some pinball.

Please not Vista

Max Payne 1 and 2, F.E.A.R, Far Cry, MAME with a couple of arcade roms like Galaga, Tetris, Pang, Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug.

And if I get bored with those there is always Microsoft solitair, mine sweeper and mayong to fall asleep on the keyboard.

Mid 2ks? Baldur's gate, in whatever version was usable

Diablo 2 with a mod: Project Diablo 2.

I'd download an offline copy of the wiki, too. And a build guide; 12 hours isn't enough time to come up with a build and play the game!

Copious amount of ebooks or web novel downloads, as well as my lofi folder for background music. All preloaded on a boot drive with a Linux distro capable of both running on the hardware and viewing everything I brought, if I can figure out how to do that. Plus however many snacks I can sneak in.

Elder scrolls morrowind. 12 hours should'nt be a Problem.

I'd love to chance to play a bunch of nostalgic titles - just off the top of my head I'd play DOOM, Uplink, Darwinia, Morrowind, and my trashy favourite from that era Themepark world. There are definitely more if I had time to think about it.

all my Napster mp3s to listen to while I beat my high score on 3D Pinball Space Cadet

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

Dungeon Keeper, Diablo II, StarCraft maybe, Morrowind, Uplink, Civilization II, Sim City 2000 or 3000 (depends on what will run), quake.

A whole 11.5 hours of extra sleep next to a nostalgia machine?? Count me in.

I'd probably bring Warcraft III, Half Life 2, and potentially Deus Ex if the PC was extra shitty.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and Commander Keen ... wait a second, the time machine's dial is broken.

Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn't a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur's gate 1 and 2...

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn't finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

This kind of feels like every work day. Except I can't use the pc for fun. Lol help me :')

+1 on roms and Doom. Maybe the sims. Tbh I'm not too familiar with that generation of PC gaming. There's probably a lot I don't know about

Open X-COM. Or well, maybe the regular X-COM, that should run just fine regularly.

Some books as epubs or whatever format is convenient, and a reader. Would have to research which one works on Windows 2000 or ME. Or was it XP already?

Civilization 3, and I would accidentally stay 20 hours

Since size of harddisk is not specified, I’d take all Nintendo consoles roms that work with emulators on that desktop. May some genesis, Atari and some PSP, basically I take myrient erista on my drive 😂

So, just a PC? No controllers or anything?

I might get a few 8 and 16 bit ROMs

And mainly movies, I'd get around to watching Rambo and get some other stuff

awkward amount of time to kill

For how long? Because that's probably the most important factor.

There's also a million indie games that run perfectly fine on mid 2000 desktop hardware. Even games that look crazy computational intensive like Factorio.