know what I find amazing.....?

[Ilwrath]

I'll openly admit it.  I love the 3d rendered games.  In fact, they're the only reason I dual-boot my PC.  And, honestly, they're the real reason I defected to x86, in the first place.

My current favorites (in no particular order)
Papyrus NASCAR 2003
IL2-Sturmovik / Lost Missions
Unreal Tournament 2003 (if only I didn't have to run a crack on my legally purchased CD just to play it...)

As for the slightly older, budget shelf, iama-  I really liked Alice.  It's very trippy, if you have a machine with enough horsepower to crank the detail.  (1+ghz / fast OpenGL card)  I wanna play that game again, too.  I loaned my copy to a friend and haven't seen it since.  :-(

Of course, I also love the old games, too...  But the power of modern machines opens up so many more possibilities for simulators.  (My favorite genre, although I occasionally enjoy shooting stuff - I can't wait for Half Life 2.)

[Ilwrath]

@Aegis-

Ilwrath: Why do you have to run a crack to play UT2003?

Actually, two reasons.
1) The original CD Copy protection would bomb out on my Toshiba DVD-ROM drive.  Someone said the newest patch takes out the CD requirement, though, so that should fix my problems.  (Once I made it to an update that worked, I stopped adding incremental patches.  I'll go back and pick up the latest one, and give it a try)

2) While playing on-line, the game bombs out with an "Invalid or Duplicate CD-KEY" error, and then dumps back into the main menu.  Now, I bought the game the day it came out, and my CD-key has never been out of my sight (not loaned or left at a LAN party, or anything like that) so I highly doubt someone copied mine....  Though an early keygen hack may have created a duplicate to my CD-Key, I should hardly be punished for that, though, since I could easily enough prove I have the original.  

Really, it's not that big of a deal, it's just that when a company releases a product that has that serious of problems with copy protection routines not working properly (yet it is cracked before release, anyhow) one really has to ask what they were thinking.  Creating hassles for your paying customers is never a good plan.  Personally, I'd have to think long and hard about if I'd bother to buy the next UT game, after this experience.

[Ilwrath]

My problem with 3d games
is that they are too unoriginal.
its like one can describe all of them
with the words 'shoot' and 'kill'.

Huh?  Hardly.  Perhaps in 3d (first person) SHOOTERS are all about shooting...  But what in Papyrus NASCAR (A descendent from Indy 500) , NHL'03, FIFA '03, or any number of other non-shooters I have sitting around here have to do with killing.  Yet they all benefit greatly from 3d hardware.  I wouldn't dream of going back and playing NHL '95 from the flat days...  Or a sprite-based 1st person racing game.

(Though, really shooters, racers, sports, simulators, and some strategy games are about all the GOOD uses of 3d I can think of.  I'm not coming up with a good unique 3d puzzle game.  The closest may be Pontifex mentioned here a while ago...)

-good- retro games bloody rocks.

Sure they do.... as do -good- modern games.  :-)  (Of course, there's probably more bad than good, both back then and now.)

When an amigan gets happy when a game is ported to amiga, it could be because they HATE using windows, and HATE when winduds screw up everything, and HATE when they have to install a gillion things on the winblows to get it work correctly or faster.
Atleast I had these problems alot
in the time I played many different games on pc.

I'd say this is the opposite.  You have to apply so damn many patches, updates, libraries, fastmem tricks, etc, just to get an Amiga game to play at a near-crawl that it really is a much larger pain than the PC version.

For the most part, on Windows....  If you're installing something to try to IMPROVE performance, it's a VERY good chance you're actually doing the opposite.  Run your Windows installation as stock as possible.  The only things you should ever update are Internet Explorer, DirectX, graphics drivers, and chipset drivers.  Period.  Ever.  Update or install something OTHER than those things, and watch the performance start falling apart.  Most of the performance problems with "Windows" start showing up when you install MusicMatch Assrape Jukebox 10.302 beta Real (registry mangler) Player 8, and any Windows Media 9 DRM crap, and such like that.  Keep it off your system, and you're home free.