Cheap gaming laptop

Buying a gaming laptop is hard and being partially blind and yet the most competent with computers I am unforunetly the goto guy for computer stuff. Hoping I could get some quick help.

My little brother starts school for computer programming in a couple weeks and he needs help buying a laptop. Light gaming, mostly Indy stuff from steam like FTL, Broken Age, and like Half-Life. Gotta be able to run Minecraft very well.

Budget! right. $700 the less the better obviously.

I actually already found a pretty good one. Is there an american equivalent? Does it matter that it's canadian?

also I forgot the product link for my find.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314127CVF

A budget is important here...cheap is relative.

Both cheap and laptop are relative terms.

For some, cheap is $300. For others, cheap is $1500.

For some, a laptop that's 17", weighs 10 pounds, and gets 20 minutes of battery life is fine. For others, anything over 14", three pounds, and under 5 hours of battery life is the worst.

Mine plays those games well, a laptop is all I have. It would likely crap itself if I told it to play something top of the line though. It's a 400-ish dollar rent a center job. Asus something or other.

Indie games and such don't typically require anything more than integrated graphics, so if that is all he wants, pretty much anything with an i5 or i7 would be fine. However, a budget, as well as the systems you are looking at would help tremendously.

Wish I could help you, spent all of last month research thing laptops to buy that can game for a small budget, but I was able to spend a little more than you, sorry. I would suggest the lenovo y510p if you can spend around 1000 as it is a quality laptop that was my second choice.

@soniking: I think that would do OK for your purposes. I gave my fiancee a similar laptop but with no dedicated graphics and it runs Psychonauts, Costume Quest, and Bioshock 1 pretty well. One thing my Alienware has that the one you picked doesn't but is invaluable to me is an HDMI out port. That allows me to hook my laptop up to my TV and use it like a console (with wireless mouse/360 controller).