I recently bought/assembled a new gaming rig. Antec case, Gigabyte motherboard, E8500 Intel, 8 gigs of DDR2 800MHz ram, 2.25TB of Seagate disk, ATI 4870 512M, Sound Blaster X-Fi card, and a Logitech X-540 5.1 sound system.

I reloaded Half-Life 2, Starcraft/Broodwar, Diablo II, Doom 3, and Command & Conquer 3. I also bought Dead Space and Fallout 3. Been playing mainly Starcraft and Fallout 3 recently.

And for the other side of the coin. I'm also playing Role Playing Games (for the folks who don't know, that's like Dungeons & Dragons). Right now I'm running two Shadowrun games (fantasy cyberpunk) and a Paranoia game. I just finished playing in an All Flesh Must Be Eaten game although I missed the ending because I was on call.

Carl

8gigs of RAM ??? You could render movie scenes while playing Dead Space!!!!

Well since Windows XP won't recognize it anyway, it's really overkill. It was cheap though. $49 (after rebates) from Tigerdirect for two 2 Gig sticks. I just couldn't pass it up.

Plus being a Unix geek, 8 gigs of RAM doesn't seem like all that much. I do remember back when I used memory managers to eke out the last few kb of RAM for my DOS stuff. And I remember my first computer, with 2kb of ram.

Carl

I was going to say...if your running a 32 bit OS...you have 5 gigs of RAM just eating up power...can't wait for the day when the gaming companies finally get into the 64 bit world and I can go ahead with putting a new gaming system together...

Those were fun days...himem.sys was a godsend...mapping to the upper memory blocks to free up enough base memory just so Wolfenstein would run...I managed to get 610k free...had to force some base processes into the upper memory region to do it... dos scripting.



I quit "hardcore" gaming a few years back...trying to keep a job while getting only 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night (1 or 2 on weekends) isn't something middle aged geeks can handle for long...good thing for coffee and dew.

Too bad that minesweeper isn't included inside the definition of 'computer games'. I'm pretty good at it. It developes your analytical and mathematical thinking.
There was a game I used to play when I was very little. I don't know how it's called, but the main character was a rabbit (or a bunny) that had to collect keys or something in different worlds - there was a field world, and a chess world, and a beach world and a snow world. I wonder how it's called. I think I was pretty good at it.
But that's it, I never played any "popular" games.
If you can recommend on anything that doesn't include war or violence, and that is good for beginners, I'd love to know. (And the most important thing is that it won't be addicting. Yeah, that's a hard one.)

I was once a nethack kind of guy. I recently bought a Wii and am into Madden Football and Wii Sport.

Ohhh....that is a tough one...Myst used to be a really fun puzzle type 3D game with no blood and guts. There are more games out there like it. You would probably like it...it's classified as a "point and click" 3D adventure game.

Here is a list of games very similar in play style:

point and click adventure reviews and news at GameSpot