Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.

Yeah, the water levels in DKC1 are pretty slick as well (Charles Cornell talks about that one too).

The DKC series also had some amazing music (especially DKC2). Overall some of my favorite games from my childhood.

Even DK64 was okay for me, though it came out at probably the best time for me to enjoy it (I think I was 11 or 12 and had lots of time to burn).

Here’s a great musical analysis on Stickerbush Symphony, for anyone interested.

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

The obvious answers are the games we endlessly replayed historically: Mario Kart, Goldeneye (VS mode), Halo (VS), Smash Bros.

If you specifically want ones on PC, I’d suggest Starcraft, Age of Empires, and probably Counter Strike (I wasn’t into that one, but it had a huge following).

Many board games fit the bill as well. Codenames (physical or online at horsepaste.com) comes to mind, and another commenter also mentioned chess.

Basically any games that were made before endlessly grinding became a thing (yep, that’s only been a thing for a decade or two).

I’m not an expert, but any time I’ve needed to do this, I set up my own router as a client to the parent router, and I set my router (client) as the DMZ in the parent router. Effectively you end up with two routers that are both (more or less) connected directly to the internet, without the two networks messing with each other. It’s also minimally invasive to the parent router (even old stock firmware has always had a DMZ option).

The tricky part then is using the wireless connection as your “WAN port,” rather than a physical one. In which case, as long as you can install OpenWRT on it, you should be fine.

Oh! And if she’s into puzzles, look at Islands of Insight. First person with puzzle solving as the main mechanic, but also some exploration and a bit of mystery to it.

I’d consider what kind of game she finds fun and compelling–that’s more likely to engage her to become familiar with the mouse/keyboard combo.

That being said, Minecraft on peaceful mode would fit and is generally approachable. Stardew Valley is pretty relaxed as well, though I don’t remember whether it uses WASD specifically.