Its all in the Colours.

The Artists wen't for realism and used realistic texturees/colours. Warhead although less techniqually impressive as Crysis it had a bigger wow factor because of the art direction. They used more intensive colours and colours that complimented each other rather than what you would find in real life.

The UT3 engine is another fine example of this. Games like Mass Effect can wow a user because of the colours and level design. UT3 actually didn't look that impressive compared although they are using the same technology.

You find WIC impressive and not Crysis though? wtf, WIC has boxy little building that are nothing more than a tectured mesh. The units are cloned and the effects are dated?
http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/worldinconflict/images/0/34/
compared to
http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/crysis/images/0/46/?tag=thumbs_below;thumb;1

Your Mad.

Hlaf Life hands down. I was glued to the screen through out. I had a series of problems with HL2 on release so I didn't actually end up finishing it off until a year later. I still play CS1.6.

Best racing games have to be:
The Burnouts
MidnightClub:LA remix
Teest Drive Unlimited
Ridge Racer
Wipeout

Personally I can't stand the NFS on psp. All the cars slide about for some reason, they dont stick to the road.

I had Tf2 running on a geforce 6600 256mb at 8000*600 everything on low with no probs, just looked like any other xbox360 game lol.

The 8400gs however is a pretty weak card, That said TF2 doesn't need that much umph to get it going. I managed to build an old rig out of parts for my brothers and before i upgraded the gfx card to a 9600gt it run fine on both a 6800gt(medium) and a 8600gt (max). A lower resolutions the 8400gs should be able to run everything on medium, its only when your use a higher resolution these newer low end cards crap out.

Check you background processes maybe something if conflicting with the game. Defrag your HDD as others have said. And if your really willing to try download rivatuner, nTune probs won't do it. Overclock the graphics card a liittle. Normally these cards are undercloaked to keep heat sink down but you can always clock it up for short periods of time.

Open up your Tools option in steam and download the SDK. From this you can run benchmark tests and see what your graphics card can handle. Run some benchmarks before and after clocking see if you get an increase in purformance.

Found this on youtube, nice list of free games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfBsS5IMdY

The problem is the by creating a demo Hackers can crack the exe and use it to create no-cd patches/images. So publishers don't want developers doing this. Although I think it would help restore some customers confidence in developers/publishers it has proven to be a back door for pirates.

Waste of money. More so for someone who doesn't know what half of that stuff is and how it can help him/her.

Take that amount of money you are going to spend and spread it over 2-3 years. DirectX11 will be out next year and your wanna have a gt300 your gtx295 will look like cr*p compared to it (gt300 ment to be 2*gtx295).

Microsoft tried to do it with Halo2/Gears/Shadowrun. It was boycotted and all those games failed on PC because of it :D

We have services like that already with far better policies that any Xbox/Playstation online service. Steam for example. Its free and people like Valve encourage things like free DLC. Buy a map? a gun? Get fu...

Go back and look at how they got the figures.

X Number of People downloading the game doesn't mean X Number of Lost sales.

It was the same with VHS and how is was going to ruin the film industry, with X$$ lost in the first year. Pssh.

lol didn't ready the date :D- o'well bumped again