Powerhouse PC landing in six hours.

[Scadente]

Yep, my brand spanking new PC is arriving in six hours. Something is dancing in my pants.

I've been using a Mac for the past years, so PC gaming is a big black hole for me. Binge-gaming sessions for the next few days, so any suggestions on interesting and new games are more then welcome :)

(No Bioware RPG's please)

[Strazos]

Planescape: Torment? Deus Ex (the first one only)? Um...Max Payne (both of them)?

[schild]

No Bioware RPG's please

Planescape: Torment?

Lol.

[Trippy]

Some sort of shiny FPS (Call of Duty 2, Half-Life 2, FEAR, Quake 4, Prey, etc.).

Company of Heroes or Dawn of War: Dark Crusade if you like RTSes.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is nice and shiny but you kind of need a gamepad. You can play it with the keyboard -- I played through X-Men Legends II on the keyboard -- but using a gamepad makes it a lot easier.

[Engels]

I'd go with Half Life 2. I've played CoD2 and Prey, as well as Doom3, and I still think that just about everything in HL2 is more fun. Its very long, tho. I still haven't finished it yet, and I played it for weeks and weeks.

[stray]

GRAW is the shiniest FPS there is atm. Multiplayer wise, Battlefield 2 is the most fun, and most unlike anything you've had on a Mac. Half Life 2 (along with a Counterstrike Source in a Steam package) is overall the best.

For RTS's, I'd say wait a little bit. The new Total War will be out soon.

[Morfiend]

GRAW sucks.

Get Prey or Half-Life 2 if you want FPS. Or F.E.A.R if you like that thing, I didnt. Oh yeah, Oblivion.

[stray]

The PC GRAW is different than the 360 one. There's nothing particularly remarkable or sucky about it (well, the maps are remarkable). Just a tactical shooter.......But very shiny.

[Scadente]

I forgot to mention that my connection at this shithole called a University flat is proxyied to death, so online gaming isn't really possible.

I heard some really good stuff about Company of Heroes, but it's WW2 *shudder* Played Oblivion on the 360, and can't say fun was a part of that experience. GRAW, FEAR, HL2 (Must be connected to Steam?), Doom 3 and Dawn of War: Dark Crusade sound good. What about the newest Civ? Or the Movies?

Only thing I had on Mac was WoW (lowest graphics 10fps and lower) and Emulators, so some FPS's that get my GeForce sweating are always a plus :)

Thanks for the pointers.

[stray]

The new Civ is fun (some may disagree that it's great....but I don't anyone would say it sucks).

The Movies is cool, but the "game" part doesn't last very long.

[Scadente]

I'm guessing it's just good 'ol Civ in shinier wrapping and with some nice tweaks here and there? Well worth the look imho.

Care to flesh out what the "game" part of the movies is? Is it anything similar to SimGolf? Which was great :) (and wasn't really about golf, at all)

edit: And how is the Movie-making part? Is it required in the management game? Does it get tedious? Is it fun at all?

[stray]

The game part of the Movies is like any Tycoon or Sims game, but with.....The Movies. It's fun enough. If you can get it for cheap, have at it.

As far as sim games go though, I'd recommend the Tropico series (Sim El Presidente). Even if it's a few years old, it doesn't matter. Sim games aren't known for graphics anyways.

[edit] Err...Wait. Tropico was on the Mac. Kinda defeats the purpose.

[edit] I've been kind of lazy with the movie making part. That and I'm a self defeating perfectionist.

It's cool (and surprisingly robust) though. Just takes a lot of time.

You can use it within the game, but it isn't required. There are all kinds of genre based storyboard/script templates to automate it.

[Scadente]

Yep, tried it. It was good, but never really caught on big time.

But that was somewhere in the middle of my worst WoW catassing, so it might be worth a second look.

I'm amazed that no-one hasn't mentioned Europa Universalis II, read somewhere that III (http://www.tothegame.com/game.asp?id=5084) is coming out Q1 2007. One of the best Strategy games I've played so far, and it's made for history nuts.

edit:
Hmmmm... The Movies aren't sounding all that bad. I'll pick it up if I find it cheap :)
(Make some fantastic historical dramas and Blade Runner rip-offs, and see my studio go bankrupt)

[ahoythematey]

If your card is a 6800, don't bother with Civ4.

My vote would be on Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.  Lots of shiny, fun, and probably damn cheap to purchase.

Far Cry is also very nice if you haven't already been subjected to it.  Half Life2 has already been mentioned, of course.

[Abel]

If you like EU II then you certainly should also pick up Hearts of Iron II Doomsday, which has been Paradox' finest hour so far ... But errrrr I see below you're not really into WW2 ... otherwise for history buffs Victoria is a good pick also (there has been an expansion for this game recently too, but I forgot the name).

Otherwise: Civ 4 Warlords (first expansion), Galactic Civilizations 2, Star Wars: Empire at War, Rome: Total War or wait for the next Total War game which is just around the corner.

And plenty of good FPS mentioned already above.

[Scadente]

I'm getting the 7900 GTO, 2gigs of Ram, 2.13 Intel Core Duo. Well good enough for a couple of years. I played some Rome: Total War multiplayer, and it was the good stuff. So I'll defineatly pick up Medieval II (and starve for a month), Knights > Romans :)

I'm not too fond of Stracraft'esque RTS, kind of burned out after playing SC extensively. Mmmm, expansion for Civ VI, sounds interesting. Never got around to try Victoria, so I'll be sure to check it out.

[Arrrgh]

It's a shame you can't just download demos.

Do they still make the computer mags with a disk full demos attached? I haven't bought one in years, but I hear there are people out there still on dial-up so I suppose there's a market.

[Strazos]

(Planescape was done by BIS, not Bioware)

[Scadente]

Reviving the thread here.

Wow, PC gaming IS fun :-D

Forgot all about that these last years. Gotta say that Im very impressed by what Ive seen so far, been strapped to the PC for a week now, non-stop. Got to try out: FEAR, very generic and very straight shooter, provides no atmosphere at all and tries a bit too hard to be scaaaary. It fails, still nice to do bullet-time and blow stuff up. Drak Messiah: Might and Magic, now there we got a pretty unique fps. The story is of course all over the place, but they get melee to work, sort of. Some nice use of terrain, very nice graphics. Very camp, I like it! Civ4: OUCH! This game hurts, I have to say that this is very fresh. Feels like the same game, just with more added stuff, alot more. The timesink is pretty big, but its all worth it, isnt it? Getting The Movies very soon, and played a full on Rome: TW multiplayer. All graphics on max, max unitsizes.... Ooooh! Feels epic in every way, cant wait to get hold of Medieval: TW 2, which also has a pretty promising Single-Player.

As for being back in the windows atmosphere, OSX is superior. Once you get the hang of things in OSX your workflow is much nicer, Im also really missing a handy app called Quicksilver. Windows has some homebrew alternatives, but its not as good, same for expose. Im often using the PC like my mac, running the cursor into the corner, pressing F9 - F12 at random times, hehe. Windows runs alot faster though, and it allows for alot of freedom. Hoping Vista will be somewhere in mac territory, Ill have to read up on that.

But now its back to the games :)

(And some studywork....) 

[OcellotJenkins]

This thread is funny to me because I just did the opposite; I bought my first Mac this week.  On one hand my 24 inch core 2 duo with 2 gig of ram iMac is the sweetest piece of computer I've ever experienced.  On the other hand, the wireless "Mighty Mouse" is the shittiest input device I've ever laid hands on.  Shit shit shitty ass and the bluetooth keyboard isn't much better.  Other than those two issues I'm in bliss.

[Tale]

Windows runs alot faster though, and it allows for alot of freedom.

Keep it clean and it'll stay that way. These days everything seems to want to install an auto-updater, a quickloader, and a tray item. I try to prevent as many of these as possible - often you have to go looking in the application's preferences/options to switch these off, other times they're setup options, but sometimes they're just plain rude and consider themselves important enough to run without telling you.

If you go Start/Run... and type msconfig, and go to the Startup tab, you can deselect them (examples: iTunesHelper, NeroCheck, qttask). There are a lot of websites with info about these processes - just google the name of the process. Also check Start/All Programs/Startup for anything unwanted. I also block some of the autoupdaters in my software firewall. It all depends on what you consider important enough to interrupt your game with a pop-up "new version ready for download" box.