It depends on what you call normal games and what you call playing them. There are many titles out on the market today that are so resource hungry that you would trouble playing theme even if you had a very strong desktop replacement notebook, but with a netbook you are most probably going to be in trouble.

If you were thinking about playing some high processor and video card demand game, like Crysis or any of the new DirectX 10 shooters, forget it. You are going to see a slow, sluggish, painful take on an otherwise possibly fun game. Just don’t try them and you are going to spare yourself the embarrassment.

However, there are many people who enjoy playing flash games. There are millions of those people in fact; Farmville had 80 million players last time I checked. A netbook with even the slower 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and the integrated graphic adapter is more or less able to run that game, and you are going to be able to get through your farm every day, without ever running into problems. Just make sure the netbook isn’t your only and main computer and you are going to be just fine.

There are other normal games that can be played on a netbook, and I see your frown when I say World of Warcraft. The latest technology in netbook-land is the HDMI supported Nvidia ION. Even though most solutions use single core 1.6GHz atom and the cheapest ION version, the LE, they could find they are going to run the game. Obviously checking out Dalaran with 1GB ram is going to be an unpleasant experience, but as long as you are doing light gaming, some battlegrounds, grinding around or checking AH, you are going to be fine.

The 9300gs chip in ION platform and the dual core 1.6GHz Atom processor is not the strongest combination of computing powerhouses on earth, but you are most certainly going to be able to use them for some gaming. Quake 3 arena is an older game but there are still many players out there. If you are a hardcore gamer, you will throw your netbook out of the window the second day, but casuals may find immense fun.

Torchlight, the new creation by some of the developers who worked on Diablo 2 runs just fine on ION based netbooks. Just make sure you get one of those computers and you are going to be able to play some of the more recent, and most of the oldies titles.