Grim Fandango really is a great game. One of the best adventures to come along in a long, long time.
If adventure games are your thing, then aside from the fantastic Monkey Island games (sad to say, they just don’t make quirkily hilarious games like that anymore) The Longest Journey is exceptional.
If you’re into CRPGs, then Baldur’s Gate is good, Icewind Dale is pretty good (IWD 2 includes a lot of very funny little jokes at the expense of traditional CRPGS, though you have to be a geek to laugh as hard as I do at them) Top of the heap, though is Planesape: Torment. I cannot recommend this game enough.
The Fallouts are good, though oddly I prefer 1 to 2. Don’t know why. Didn’t really care for Fallout: Tactics. Again, don’t know why.
Into non-realtime strategy at all? Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri should run on your machine, and it’s one of my faves.
I’ll second System Shock 2. One of the best games ever made, hands down. Creepy story, paranoia inducing mood, addictive gameplay, top-notch writing and voice acting, and one of the best villains in PC gaming.
Unless your computer is a weirdo ultra discount model, NHIBI , you probably have a 16MB graphics card. It would help a lot if you post the model name and # so we can get some idea of what it can do. Most new games want 32MB cards or better.
I definately reccomend Thief: The Dark Project. It will run fine on your system whatever your card. It is definately a switch from most FPS games. Almost every enemy is more powerful than your character so you have to use strategy. The story is great, though some of the levels suffer from cliched design. Play this game at night in a quiet room for maximum effect.
[minor hijack] I’m most of the way through Thief, and I’m wondering if Thief II is any good. Does it have as good a story as the original? Are there many more goodies to play with? [/minor hijack]
I’d also recommend Dungeon Keeper II for sheer twisted fun. It’s a basic sim game, three-dee… in which your job is to build a dungeon, attract in monsters by building rooms to suit their needs, stock the place with treasure and traps, and exterminate the goodly heroes who wander in from time to time to do good deeds and loot the place.
Three modes:
Campaign (achieve a series of goals on a series of missions to win the game)
My Pet Dungeon (achieve a series of goals to move to the next game, but you can keep playing with the dungeon you’ve built, even after you’ve “won”)
…and Skirmish mode, where you play against the computer or other human players, as Heroes or rival Dungeon Keepers.
dungeon keeper II is pretty close to being unplayable now adays. I had enough problems on Windows 98 when I tried to play it in XP it doesn’t even display the text in the opening menu!
Shame because some times you just want to slay some do-gooder dwarves and humans.
The best way to get system stats is the dxdiag tool:
go to Start menu
click Run
type in the word “dxdiag” (no quotes) and press Enter
This will tell you all kinds of details on all your basic system stats, as well as any game related hardware (that is, video cards are in there, but printers aren’t).
As for the Sims, I really don’t like that series. The original was OK, but every time you add an expansion the install size and load time both increase to more and more intolerable levels. Furthermore, there are two fundamental flaws with this series: one is that installing expansions in other than the order of first publication* will nearly always screw the whole thing, which means you have to uninstall everything and start over. In some cases this requires a regedit and manipulation of InstallShield data. The other flaw is that the saved game data and the template data are the same data. This means that if your saved game gets corrupted, which is fairly common**, you can’t just delete the saved game and start over. You have to uninstall, delete, reinstall. With some of the later expansions this was rectified to some extent by including some separate template files that the user could manually copy and paste in Windows, but this doesn’t always work properly.
Sims, Livin’ Large, House Party, Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed, Superstar, Makin’ Magic. Deluxe includes the first two, while Double Deluxe includes the first three; these were released later and fix some stability problems but you still have to do it in the right order.
** Cheat codes and non-Maxis created add-ons are the most common cause, but it can also just happen at random.