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.

Civilization 3, and I would accidentally stay 20 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

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

Only 12 hours? LoTR extended edition.

12 hours? I'm sleeping through that whole thing

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

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

Or morrowind if it can handle it

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.

12 hours of trying to overclock a mid 2000s desktop as much as I can

I could bring the whole Person of Interest series and wouldn't finish a season. That, or any TV series with reasonable length. I was thinking:

• Dark
• Breaking Bad
• Fringe
• Mr. Robot
• Hannibal
• Battlestar Galactica
• The Expanse

Speaking of, I wonder what the mid-00s performance for decoding HEVC.

Also, what do I get from this, anyway?

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

Winamp with my favorite skin

Entirety of my mp3 collection

All 7 seasons of DS9

All 5 seasons of Kids in the Hall

Porn

Emulators definitely should still run fine for GBA games I'd think. So there's a lot to choose from already in that library. If not, then SNES. even a potato from the mid 2000s can run SNES games.

Other than that, I'm thinking I would load up my entire calibre Epub library so I can read books. I have so many books I want to go through that I have collected over the years. Want to go through the entire Dune series for the first time among other books.

I'm also quite certain a mid 2000s office PC can run VLC. I have many older series I have yet to watch still because I've been so busy. Stuff like The Shield or The Wire that I have downloaded but never got around to watching.

I don't think I would get bored without internet for 12 hours at all with all that media at my disposal. Even on a 128gb thumb drive, I can easily bring in 2-3 full 1080p tv series. Epubs and retro system ROMs take no space at all so that'd be easy.

And if I get bored of all that media somehow, I'd just use an offline copy of wikivoyage to plan my next vacation.

Factorio

EZPZ

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

ADoM

Donkey Kong Country and SNES9x

2005, you say? I bet KOTOR could run on low on a shitty office PC.

Master of Orion 2

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

Please not Vista

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.

Stardew valley

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction

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

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.

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.

Windows XP pinball

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

Dwarf fortress

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 😂

Depends. Are we in the 2000s or is it present day stuck with a 2000s desktop? If the former, I'd grab Final Fantasy XI and relive my childhood. If the latter, I'd download a few seasons of Buffy and Xena and chill out with some popcorn.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Stuck? Sounds more like a gift to me.

I'd probably not waste any time and play minesweeper

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

Lemmings.

Nothing else. 😛

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