Shooters: Deus Ex, Max Payne 1&2, Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, Clive Barker's Undying and just about any Silent Hill game for the chill factor.

RPG: KOTOR, NWN2 (for character interaction and influence), Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate 2 and the Fallout series.

Strategy: Homeworld, Starcraft & Starcraft Brood War, Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne

These games all have something that tends to draw you in and keep you there just to see what happens next and generally end with a good finale, or bad, or good/bad in the case of multiple endings. Probably the one that I've listed that sticks with me the most is Homeworld, havn't cared as much about any other group of people in a game like these, the story was genuinely great and if you havn't played the game, you should try to find it somewhere.

Undying comes in a close second, it's really a shame that more people didn't give the game a run, one of the best shooter horror stories ever (kicks the crap out of F.E.A.R's tidbits of story here and there). Immersive world anda novel-quality story of a doomed family complete with some of the most interesting and dangerous enemies around made it a hard act to follow.

And finally Starcraft and the expansion come in third for me. Some of the most interesting character and one of the best backdrops for a Sci-Fi strategy game while still having a great strategy mechanic to it

I give WC3 a nod although I didn't like the story and ending quite as much as Homeworld or Starcraft, it still had some great characters and some nice new locations for the Warcraft Universe. I also give Max Payne 1&2 a nod, great revenge stories as well as KOTOR for capturing what made Star Wars so great in the form of a game that could have been easily turned into a movie script.

I'm sure I missed a lot of them, but most of these are games that have stuck with me for quite some time, and I enjoyed most of them nearly equally, but some really nice picks so far by everyone, glad a lot of you still keep an eye out for a great story, it's the main thing that elevates games to an art form.

Just about any mid-high range DX10 card should run it without much trouble. Crytek has said quite a few times that they havn't used DX10 to make the game prettier, but to optimize it, so DX9 and DX10 should look nearly identical, but you'll get a boost by being able to use the optimized DX10 paths which put a lot more load on the graphics card and takes it off of your CPU. We still don't know how much of an increase there will be, but everything about DX10 seems amazingly stream-lined, so we should start seeing high-end graphics hardware actually being put to a lot better use than we've seen in the past.

But I'm quite confident Crytek can pull off making it play well across a variety of cards given how well Far Cry was optimized when it was released while still beating all the other big hitters to the market, they've seem interested in making sure that they're on the bleeding edge of PC gaming features while still keeping it accessible.From the sound of things, the game is finished, but they're still optimizing it to make sure they get the best product out the door, and I applaud them for that, not many PC developers will stillactually stressmaking sure the game is running as efficiently as possible, they just rely on making sure it runs OK on the powerhouse cards on the market, and that's where the the PC gaming decline comes from.

   Havn't gone and researched your speakers, but I'm guessing that they're a 5.1 setup (Left, Right, Center, Back Left, Back Right and a subwoofer).  Not sure what you're trying to do to make all the speakers work, most come with a setup program that lets you test each speaker.  Need to give a bit more information about what you've tried to make them work or just call the manufacturer's customer support line.  Can't really help with a vague problem.