I have a deathrig with every utility imaginable. Welding rigs, chemical labs, minifridges, generators, etc.
So why is it that the ONLY things in this universe that can play games are handheld consoles and game watches?
Why not just salvage and rebuild computers?
Here’s the idea - you can find discs scattered around the world of Cataclysm. Some will contain info, some will be empty or broken, and others will contain games.
We already have playable games such as Snake, so it’s a matter of reusing them. A randomly generated table of subtitles such as “Super”, “DRM-Protected”, or just typical numbers (Ex: Snake 4: Electric Boogaloo) will be applied to game cartridges and will mix up the buffs you get from them. DRM-Protected will remove all fun from your game since it’s always online and you’ll need to be a computer whiz to play it, Super might affect the fun, etc.
Game scores will be randomly generated and applied, which is literally just going to be a number from 1 to 10.
Computer frames can be built from scrap, plastic, or found/salvaged. This will act like any other car furniture, and it will have an internal storage.
It will not be extremely complicated - there’s no PCI ports, no wiring, etc, because that would be absolutely ridiculous. Instead, it would work as a chest.
The internal storage isn’t a typical chest, it is what is in your computer. Removing items with the category of disk will require no expertise, but adding items with the category of computer part will require some skill in computers depending on how much shit you already have in there (ex: installing three graphics cards)
Since the interwebs are down, you’re going to have to rely on physical media. These can be recovered from labs and search engine database buildings, houses, etc. The more sensitive/important the info is, the more powerful of a computer it’ll take to run it.
It provides fun and knowledge, and with a good vehicle setup it’ll run forever. It sounds pretty overpowered, which brings me to how it could be balanced.
It requires two things - ventilation and electricity. If you don’t stick enough fans there to run your 4 GPU monstrosity, your computer will melt. If you don’t supply enough electricity for your monstrosity, it will, well, you know.
The more budget your build is, the less electricity and ventilation it needs. Therefore, if you want to hook one up to your looter scooter for on-the-fly data access, you might want to rethink the 8-core Haswell.
Most of the systems I’ve described rely on one thing - the components. This means that the necessary Computer Skill, electricity, ventilation, etc needed will be based solely on the stats of the components. This way it’ll be much easier to program in - just have a single function that you pass the component values to and you’re set.