A few weeks ago I built my first gaming rig with a lot of help from my favorite brother. We built it from the ground up with about $1,400 worth of parts (Vista and $250 monitor included in price). For the first time in about five years, I have a rig that can actually run games coming out. For those of you that are interested, it's got a GeForce 8800GTS, 2.0 GHz (overclocked to 2.6) Core Duo, and 2GB Ram. It's pretty damn sweet.

I bought Company of Heroes and Oblivion right away with it, and I've been having some spontaneous purchases from Direct2Drive thanks to their "below $20" section. Far Cry for $10 seemed like a complete no-brainer, so I downloaded that right away and actually have played that the most. I finally finished the game today after about 25 grand hours of intense jungle creeping - very fun stuff. I wrote up a quick review on it and ended up giving it a 9.3. Besides some suspicious AI behavior and a lackluster finale, it's an incredible game, and I recommend anyone with a half decent rig that hasn't checked it out over the last three years to head over to D2D immediately and downloading it. I would seriously say that it's the best ten gaming bucks I've ever spent.

I've gone on a crazy demo downloading binge, and I had a few pleasant surprises. First off, Prey is actually a very solid FPS and at the very least, extremely easy on the eyes. Except when your grandfather is going stabbed by alien spikes. I may have to give in and D2D that for a slim $20. Another pleasant demo surprise was Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. Not only did it look a lot better than I expected, but it played great. And once I saw D2D offered it for only $10 a few hours ago, I just had to get it. I just played the first three missions, and it is great, great fun.

The weirdest play I've had yet is the Halo PC demo. I've played the Halos for hundreds of hours on my trusty Xbox (and not so trusty broken 360), so playing that on a mouse and keyboard was really strange. But awesome. Being a bit of a newbie at the WASD still, I had some trouble with the incredibly movement-intensive firefights Halo runs on, but man, the mouse is so nice. Don't even ask me how much I'd be willing to spend for a PC version of Halo 3 come September. There's no way I'm waiting two or three years to play that game again (the Beta was so sweet), so I guess I'll just have to put up with the gamepad. It could be worse.

So anyway, back to present day. I'm in this crazy frenzy of playing all these different games almost simultaneously. I have Fable: The Lost Chapters almost done (it's shallow and short, but still damn fun), Half-Life 2 I'm slowly but surely getting through (and loving), Company of Heroes I just started playing through the campaign today (definitely not your dad's RTS, what a ride that it is), and I'm playing through Oblivion's main storyline. I played it on 360 and never got that much into it, even though I feel in love with Morrowind, but I'm really enjoying it more on my PC. Some mods and tweaking really makes it pretty and run smoother, and the mouse and keyboard is nice. Oh, right, and it doesn't freeze every two hours. That's always good. And then I'm playing Raven Shield and the original Splinter Cell for some intense Tom Clancy fun.

The craziest thing is that I don't really miss achievement points. In fact, I feel liberated in a way.