Anyone out there a gamer? When I'm not monkeying around with the Focus I like to do a little gaming. I mostly play on PC and my games of choice are:

-Left 4 Dead
-Grid
-Burnout: Paradise

All three are available on the consoles as well but the online modes for each are not cross-platform (with good reason in Left 4 Dead) which means you're restricted to playing others with the same game on the same platform. Left 4 Dead rocks because it's very beginner friendly, can be made very difficult should you want it to be, and does not require a cutting-edge PC to run smooth.

If anyone has a StreamID let me know.

I am a gamer,....of sorts. I was extremely addicted to World of Warcraft late last year into early this year. I quit, twice. I haven't played now for about 3 months.

Have you played GTA4 for the PC? I really want to get that one, but just haven't yet.

I was a pretty avid gamer at one point, but I've cut back considerably. Last year I played Call of Duty 4 for over 720 hours online. I also beat Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Dead Rising, and put a ton of time into Street Fighter 4 on Xbox 360. Now I mostly play PSX, PS2, and PSP.

I haven't played GTA4 on PC for two reasons. One I have it on PS3 and two I heard the port over to PC wasn't very well optimized. I frequent a computer forum and when I saw all the reports of guys with their uber machines having difficulty getting it to run smoothly at the higher settings it kind of put me off.

I used to play WoW too until it started to consume my life I'd sit down and play for what I thought was a couple hours and find out I had been playing for closer to 5 or 6. It's fun but needs to be moderated. I haven't played a lot since Lich King came out but my friends have been saying that it's too dumbed down for them and got boring.

I'm a huge PC gamer play Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty World at War mainly. Play just about every night and read these forums in between.

I have heard good things about World at War but have never played it. Is there a co-op mode or is it team based? I hate it when a noob like me hops on a server for the first time and either gets thrashed or ridiculed for not being more familiar with the game.

I used to be a huge gamer. i played counter-strike for a long time. then got a 360 and started playing cod4. Now i dont play too much, dont really have time to play, but when i do have extra time i love gaming. I need to buy NHL 09 for ps3... best game EVER!!!!

I bought GTA4 for my PC yesterday. I installed it, that went fine, then I played. That's where the problem is. The game plays very slow and choppy. I guess my comp is not good enough for it. I still played it for a bit, ran over a bunch of people and shot some too...but it plays so choppy. Suckes. D you guys know anything I can do to make it play better?

More RAM and/or a video card upgrade will certainly help.

PC games mostly but lately I've been spending a lot of time on the PS2 running GT4.

On the PC it's still Call of Duty mostly.

I used to play PC games almost exclusively, but it's gotten to the point where my machine is so far behind what I'd need that I don't really feel like upgrading it anymore. I've got a PS3 and a 360 that have been taking care of most of my gaming. I only got the 360 because all the people I game with nowadays use them.

I've got Left 4 Dead, but only on the 360. Next time Valve has a big sale I'm buying it for PC so I can play with my friends in CA, though.

My only issue with consoles is the image quality, it just can't compare to a decent PC.

You can get into a pretty damn good PC for well under a grand these days.

The image quality is good enough on my 720p TV that I don't really care. I would prefer to have a kickass gaming PC, but there are also console-exclusive games I like.

^^True

I love building PCs and with a grand I think I could do a lot! All you really need as a fairly fast dual-core and a halfway decent video card.

Here are some of my last builds:

Yeah, and for a grand I can also have my PS3 and my 360 with a bunch of games. I also get to know that they'll have another 5 years or so in their product cycles without needing to upgrade them to play a game that's released for one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I like PC gaming. I dig WASD. But when my top-of-the-line video card from less than 2 years previous can barely chug along on the lowest quality settings in a new game it means I have to divert my money from something else to fix it. That means I can't buy toys for my cars. It made more sense to me to pay $200 for a 360 than to pay $500 for a new video card, motherboard, CPU and RAM. The desktop is basically an appliance now and I'm fine with that.