There are a lot games from here and Steam that I try to run on Wine and it seems they are wonky.

I have Linux Mint with an i5 4210 processor and 8gb Ram. No dedicated gpu.

Problem is, the newer games run more stable and reliably than the older games. I would play those, but they are more resource intensive and require hardware that has to be much more sustainable than what I currently have.

On my last installation of Linux Mint 18.3 at least 2 of the games ran fine and it was the latest stable version of Wine.

Now I upgraded my laptop and most of the games refuse to run. I went to this thread and was told to obtain Wine 3.9 which is a staging release and obviously unstable, unless I'm mistaken.

I very well could be since I'm fairly new to Linux. That said, I would like to get these games running on the latest stable release of Wine without of course, resulting to anything developmental.

All I want to do is to be able to play some of the old games I have on a laptop that would otherwise be able to handle it. Is there a way to do that or is the latest stable release of Wine just useless for that kind of thing?

Case by case. Some games run well, others not so well. If you think an older release of wine worked better, you could report the regression. You could also tweak the settings in wine...

There are additional factors, like the choice of GPU. In my experience, Intel GPU works great (provided you're running older games where performance isn't an issue).

If you have problems running a specific title, you should mention it. Also check out the big thread where people test games in Wine.

In my experience, Wine works great and even better than Windows for old games. I wanted to play Diablo 2 with my sister; we couldn't get it working on her Windows box so I installed Linux & Wine on a USB stick and gave it to her. Good gaming session.

Thank you for the reply, the thread I mentioned, is that the one you're talking about or am I missing something?

I did forget to mention the games I tried out and right now, I'll just limit it to the GOG games I tried:

Dead Space

Death to Spies 1

Rune Classic

Race Driver: GRID

Splinter Cell

Total Overdose

This one might be because of Mesa. Hoping it will be fixed in Mint 19 but for Mint 18 the solution seems to require downloading an unstable/bleeding edge version.

On configurations:

I tried to mess around with the graphics configuration but that made no difference. I left the others alone because, like I said, I'm fairly new to Linux. I want to know exactly what a setting will do in regards to my situation before messing with it.

what's the version number of the stable wine version you are using ?
somebody mentioned in another thread that his distro ships a really ancient wine version (I think it was also Mint).
While not using the very latest development version may be a wise call, but using an super old version is also causing a lot of (unnecessary) trouble ;)
fwiw the latest stable version is 3.0

Yes, it is the latest stable version of Wine. That's the thread I linked in the first post and as I mentioned, I was advised to run the staging version of Wine, which is what I want to avoid because that is unstable.

Yeah, sorry, I don't know how I managed to overlook that you already mentioned the thread. Of these, I've played through Rune Classic and it had no issues running with Intel graphics & wine staging. That was maybe a couple years ago though, and right now I don't have the time to check how it runs with the current stable or staging release. I would expect it to run great though.

I tried Race Driver: GRID and that was one of the few games that I really couldn't get working at all.

Unfortunately I have no experience with the other games.

It's not uncommon to have different versions and even different configs for each of the games, but you need to manually set a prefix for each settings/maps. This way you can use the version that is most suited to that particularly game, and separate config folder will ensure that the setup won't affect another game. Bit more to do but better to maintain overall, especially when testing and you can just delete that one folder and just start over without affecting the others.

An easier option is to use PlayonLinux to help you to set up different wine versions and separate configs for each of the games.

Btw; check out https://wiki.dotslashplay.it/en/start for some pre-made setup scripts for some of GOG's games, and also this one if you havn't seen it yet: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion

I haven't tried those games either. I usually go with DOSBOX and Diablo 1.

So Race Driver: GRID could be a possible constant but maybe I should be able to get Rune running somehow. Maybe it's unlikely to get running without staging so I may have to let that one and Race Driver go. That first paragraph you wrote went right over my head. I have no idea which settings or maps you are referring to as I'm barely familiar with winecfg and Mint. I do apologize and have no intention of offending, I'm just fresh to this and getting used to troubleshooting. It seems like a constant for games.

All I know about PlayonLinux is that I have had to uninstall it multiple times because most likely I have no idea how to configures as when I have tried it in the past and in this installation, it starts none of those games. I know that trying Lutris over and over finally helped me run a couple games but downloading the scripts from the Lutris site on its own, is its own ordeal. I have no idea how to use those Lutris scripts after downloading them as they are in quite a different format compared to vv221 and Adam's.

I ran Total Overdose by using Adam's script and I think the issue is with Mesa. I have played the first Hitman using Adam's script and that is one of the games that are working, which makes me think even more that it's a software issue. I am still trying out one of vv221's scripts and I may need to ask him for help in getting those installed but I'm sure he is really busy with scripts of other games. Last time I spoke to him, he was trying to figure out how to solve audio issues with Beyond Good and Evil.

Check this site: https://www.gamersonlinux.com/forum/portal/index.php

There are many step by step guides ( for noobies like us :D) of setting up and installing games with playonlinux. Helped me a lot while i was using ubuntu. :P