FEAR and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Thief III Deadly Shadows
Prey
Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal 2

By the time XP came out I wasn't playing as much as I used to during the Dos and Win98 era, but here are some titles I remember playing and having fun with:

Prince of Persia the sands of time
Doom 3
Half Life 2
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
Return to Castle Wolfenstein

I don't think there are (m)any XP era games (up to 2006) that this machine won't run well. Your GPU might be struggling with the newer titles at higher resolution, but you can easily just put in a 8800 GT or GTX 285.

Ah, there are tonnes of games to choose from that run happily on dual core and are awesome games too like the others mentioned above, but I will try and narrow it down a bit 😀

Red faction 1 and 2
Sims 1, 2 and possibly 3.
SimCity 3000 and 4000
Deus ex (Or Deus Ex GOTY, same game but with all patches already installed)
maybe Deus ex: invisible war (This is very unstable sadly 😒)
Just barley Deus Ex: Human revolution on lowest settings you can (Not too sure about this though)
Tomb Raider: Angel of darkness
Tomb Raider: legend and anniversary
Possibly Tomb Raider: Underworld (Again not too sure)
Portal 😁
American McGee's Alice
Quite possibly TimeShift but on very low settings
Fallout 3 maybe? But New Vegas requires more powerful hardware.
Mirror's Edge
Mass Effect (Maybe 2 as well, unsure about 3)
Jurassic park: Operation Genesis 😜
Halo 1 and 2 for PC.
Tron 2.0
There was also an add on for Doom 3 called Resurrection Of Evil. If you are playing via disc, you may find it on eBay. Otherwise, Steam.

And many more can be found by typing "windows XP games" into google. I think It's usually best to go for games around earlier than 2009-10 as after that is when the specs started getting serious.

Thanks for all the feedback! Can anyone confirm if Halo 2 will run on XP SP2? I thought Vista on up was in the specs.

Everything released between Oct 2001 and Dec 2010 is a great start, and there's plenty of games beyond that point forward that still can technically function on XP w/ DX9-class hardware. Compiling a forum list would be ludicrous. It would be much easier to list the notable exceptions in the XP period. The reluctance for Vista 'upgrades' helped XP's shelf life for the videgames market bigtime.

Peak XP marketing has been 2004-2005 though, when some games had some unrealistic "XP-exclusive" content to screw over the Win9X holdovers who didn't buy into the XP madness for many years (i.e. me)

Just a heads up if you do go for the CD/DVD version of Half life 2, portal, Deus Ex: HR, Sims 3, Mass Effect 3 then make sure the CD key has not been used, if it has been used and it says something like steam or origin client needed then you have just bought a dud for a lot of money 😜

I think there were some very early versions of Half life 2 that came out just before steam did and so they should work with no key needed, but I may be wrong.

And for Mirror's edge after the install it will need to connect to the internet to activate the game with EA, does not matter if it is second hand as long as the previous user has deleted it from their computer before passing it on.

@leileilol: Did a lot of users continue to use Win 9x well into the 00s, a lot more than those who moved to XP? I do not remember that era much since I was at high school and I played games on a PS2/1. I had still a by then ancient windows 98 computer and I thought I was the only one in school who did as people would screw up their faces when they heard of win 98 😜 But was it very popular even then?

c64z80 wrote:

I think there were some very early versions of Half life 2 that came out just before steam did and so they should work with no key needed, but I may be wrong.

Nope. Steam released prior to HL2 and HL2's earliest retail release required it. It would require it to de-encrypt, update (which will then require Windows XP and a Pentium 4/PM/AXP for the new Steam client alone) and then download a few GBs anyway because of the orangebox / steampipe updates that deprecated the old GCF cache system that was there in 2004 (the retail discs generally installed a few GCF files only)

and yes Win9x was still popular. Win2000's breakage of DOS games (well more like unimplementage in ntvdm) in early 2000 got me stuck to Win9X until there was a certain solution coming into existence that eased the growing pains of jumping to anything on the NT kernel (and Linux as well).

all of these should run ok apart from halo 2 (there is an xp mod)
a couple of games aka bioshock wont have certain graphical features enabled (aka dx10)