Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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

probably some snes roms, an emulator, and some ebooks

warcraft 3, sid's pirates, civ 3 or 4. portable of vlc for some classic 90's anime.

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

12 hour morrowind marathon begin. and a few seasons of TV series I like.

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?

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.

Surprised no one mentioned GTA series

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

Some retro computer emulators(Atari 8-bit, C64) and my dev environment for them - when you target old stuff you can customize the whole dev tooling setup with very little compromise, especially if you go the route of assembly/Basic/Forth and then pile on higher level build steps. I'd have to be careful around the potential problem of "whoops there's a 64-bit binary in there and I'm on a 32-bit OS".

Basically if I were back in college it'd be that all the time, and then VLC and some anime or movies in 480p. No sense in keeping up with those darn 2000's games.

I'd copy my Doom and Quake folders, hoping the modern sourceports still work on them. Well, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should both work. Then all my emulators up to the 32-bit era, some music and the seasons of Kamen Rider and Ultraman that I'm currently watching.Honestly I could just bring my actual external hard drive or my HP laptop from 2013 that I installed Linux on. It's what I got on those.

12h is barely enough for 1.5 out of 33 of Ascendance of a Bookworm volumes. I would probably rererereread volume 1 and 18

Civilization 4, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White just to name a few. See you next year. :p

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!

0. Newest Linux distro
1. G4 and G5 MLP episodes

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.

Morrowind, RCT2, Total Annihilation with all my mods and Deadlock 2 as well if I have time.

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.

Zsnes and a few roms

Silent Hunter III

Sink some tonnage.

I would only need a copy of Gothic 1

Install the gta 3d games need for speed most wanted 05 and music from 80s to the 90s

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

Angband or umoria

12 hours? Lol probably just some stuff to code on and screw around in. I'll probably take a nap in there somewhere to kill time

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

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

When what happened to me, I had Chrono Trigger. Shortest 12 hours of my life

Tutorial videos for programming

If it were actually the mid 2000s, I'd be okay for an insane amount of time with just Flash and Audacity. Today, probably the first Baldur's Gate.

Oo or an snes emulator with Shadowrun.