Ordered a new PC. What to play first?

After a pretty long hiatus, I'm making a concerted attempt at getting back into PC gaming. I just ordered a new system, and it should be here in about a week. My old system (Athlon XP 2200+, 512 RAM, GeForce 5900FX) had gotten to the point that I couldn't really play most of the newer games, so I haven't bothered with anything that might have even a little bit of eye candy for almost a year. I picked up the following games, but am looking for a few others that would be good.

- Quake 4
- Oblivion (the main impetus behind the upgrade)
- Age of Empires III
- I may also pick up Heroes of Might & Magic V

What else should I take a look at? Any real gems that I may have missed over the past year or so?

P.S. New system specs (not mind-blowing, but definately better than before)
- Athlon 64 3500+
- 1 GB RAM
- Geforce 7600GT
- 160 GB HD

P.P.S. The only PC games I've played in the last 2 years were: Civ IV, Gal Civ II, HL2 (barely ran), Fate, Albatross 18, Guild Wars (my final attempt at getting into MMORPG's. Realized I just don't like them.), and Dungeon Siege II.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I actually bought HOMM V, hoping it would run on my current system. It was serviceable if I cranked down all the details, but still ran like molasses. I enjoyed it, but probably not enough to re-pay full price for it (sold it once I realized it wouldn't run). I'll probably wait for a price drop and/or an expansion that adds a random map generator, as is the rumor.

Doesn't Quake 4 use the same engine as Doom 3? I tried Doom 3 on X-box, and was completely underwhelmed. The graphics were fine, but the game was just boring as hell. I've heard Q4 has a bit more focus on action, so I'll give it a shot.

Oh, and Oblivion will definately be the first one that gets fired up when the new system arrives. To be honest, the main reason I did the upgrade in the first place was simply to play Oblivion.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Shenlon

F.E.A.R. is high in the ranks of awsome.
I also didn't like guild wars nor any mmorpg but city of villians is great. They have a free trial at fileplanet so maybe you might want to catch that.
I havn't played many pc games myself so thats all I can really recommend.

I tried the FEAR demo on a friend's system, and didn't care for it much. Maybe it was just the demo levels, but it felt like a pretty 'been-there-done-that' shooter that looked pretty. Might try the full version though. I also did the free trial of CoH. No matter what the setting, I just don't like MMORPG's. At various times, I've tried EQ, Dark Age of Camelot, FF XI, City of Heroes, and Guild Wars. I guess I'm just not a social enough person to really enjoy them, as other players tend to annoy me no matter what I play.

A couple others that piqued my interest today:

- Titan Quest (I'm a sucker for anything hack-n-slash)
- Star Wars: Empire at War

Will probably wait for a price drop, though. I think the 3 I've got will do for quite a while.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Ugh. Well, the beast has died.

My motherboard crapped out after only 3 weeks. I called GigaByte to see what they could do, and was told that 'not POST-ing is a known issue with this board'. Are you fucking kidding me? I'd say that not booting is a pretty major problem. How do you still sell the board if not booting is considered a 'known issue'? On top of that, they wanted me to send the board back and they would try to repair it, which takes 4-6 weeks. If they couldn't repair it, they would send the broken board back to me to send back to the reseller. Fat fuckin' chance of that. I just called the resellers I bought the system from and they're going to swap it instead. I'm going to upgrade to an Asus board, as I've never had a problem with them. Only bummer is that I have to send the whole thing back to them, so I'll be gaming computer-less for at least 2 weeks.

Lesson learned: Don't ever (a) skimp on the motherboard to get better parts elsewhere (I skimped in order to get a better video card, and (b) don't ever buy a GigaByte motherboard.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Ashton

How did you 'skimp' to get a better video card? I have that same video card, costed me $180.

I originally had an Asus mobo picked out that was $110, but I downgraded the board to the Gigabyte one ($60) and used the $50 difference to upgrade the video card from a 6600 to the 7600GT. It is a pretty awesome card, and now I wish I had just dropped the extra $50 in the first place and gotten both.

Quote:

Titanquest is a very beautiful game and runs OK. It's very buggy right now but very fun.

I had Titan Quest, but had major problems with it. It's a fun game, but I could only play for 45-60 minutes before it would CTD and it usually corrupted my save files when it did. I'll probably give it another shot once it's patched a bit.

I was speaking idiomatically.