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what?!!! some girls like to play and FPS, RPG, Scrabble or something else. maybe even try http://isketch.net/ if you don't know what your girlfriend likes... YOU FAIL BY NOT ASKING HER!

I really enjoy iSketch in my free time. http://www.isketch.net/ It's pretty much just online Pictonary.

Yeah, I was going to suggest that site.

And, IMO, the ulitmate casual gamer game:

isketch -- Pictionary as played by 10 people in a chatroom and refereed by a computer...ADDICTIVE STUFF.

Heck, with the right drivers, you specify the drawing area only as a certain portion of the screen (the tablet I'm looking at buying supports this), and configure the D-Pad and other buttons to switch drawing tools or colors. It'd make for a neat little toy/tool.

All this is true, but if you are talking 2D games, then performance does become almost a non-issue, and you don't have to concern yourself with any of this.

For other types of games, however, graphics are a significant part of the overall gaming experience. Certainly not the only part, or the most important part, but they're important nonetheless. I look forward to seeing what developers can do with the more powerful hardware that's being released, as do many others. It's a huge portion of the gaming market, and one that nobody who has much to do with the technology of gaming wants to ignore entirely.

Some of my favorite games are 2D.. older NES and SNES titles, older PC games, GBA games, and iSketch. I could play all of these on the $700 machine I built my dad several months ago just fine. But I also greatly enjoy games like Halo, EverQuest and Grand Theft Auto III quite a bit, and though they could all run on my father's machine, (though none of them are cutting edge games graphically anymore), and I'd have to run them with more conservative display settings than I do on my midrange gaming PC... which isn't that great, considering the fact that these games could look even better on my PC if I didn't have to tune back some of the settings for the sake of performance.

I don't personally buy a lot of cutting edge 3D games as soon as they come out, due to the fact that I'm on a budget, and because I don't want to pay full price for a game that I'll have to play with conservative display settings. But that's fine, because eventually the bleeding edge trickles down into a manageable price point, the hardware gets cheaper, the software gets cheaper, and I get to play cooler looking games eventually.

And, on the subject of the "levels" thing, there is a lot of stuff to keep track of if you want to gauge the relative gaming power of a PC... you've got two companies producing multiple CPU models, which are clocked at different speeds... and you have two graphics cards companies essentially doing the same... plus RAM speed/size considerations, ect. Simplifying all of this for the non-enthusiastic who nonetheless enjoys 3D games would be great, but the only ways I could think of to do this would be very messy and possibly quite inaccurate (and therefore, essentially useless.)

Just under two minutes... but then, I play a lot of iSketch. The main bottleneck was coming back to make sure I hadn't missed any terms from your description.

Two minutes is a long time, but if the search engine could work off my picture then I would get the pose in it, instead of just ANY picture of lesbian grannies tied up and penetrated. It's a trade-off. The time I saved with a good sketching engine would come in not having to look at so many pictures to find the right one. With the description you gave, I'd like to look at as few as possible.

Personally, I doubt it would pick up on the granny bit, because it would have to ignore wrinkles in case the artist is just shaky. The Gary Larson granny glasses were a nice touch, though.

Of course the real search engine in the article is for 3-D mechanical parts, not 2-D pictures of human parts.

Now the question is... do you want the picture? *wink*

Pictionary online!!

I don't even know if it's flashs' fault. maybe it's Mozilla's...maybe both...because even a god damned gif uses 5% cpu. In any case, Flash is pretty much unusable because of the horrible framerates.

And no, Shockwave isn't available, which makes fun things like iSketch completely unusable.

And why the hell was my original post modded funny, I was being serious.

Coolest "non-gamer" online game:
isketch, which is basically Pictionary in an online/chatroom setting. It picks a sketcher, gives 'em a word, and then awards points based on who gets it first. I love games that are creative as well as addictive.

iSketch... it's like online Pictionary. It's fun, easy to learn, and doesn't involve direct competition (which can be a plus sometimes).

Depends on the game, I'd rather play iSketch on it vs. a regular computer.

it is a great time to be in games!!

I'm not so sure that I agree with this.

Is it really a great time to be 'in games'?

As a lone programmer, I say not. How many even slightly successful games these days are produced by single programmers or even small teams? Sure, there are a few very successful examples but they're all lo-fi or Shockwave games.. and not the typical 'computer games' we're used to.

It might be a great time to be in games for the coders like John Carmack who have about 20 art guys behind them, or for individual members of their teams who get control over a tiny aspect of the game (like Tim Willits), but on a personal level, it kinda sucks right now.

Games have taken the same track as movies. In the early days of movies, a small team would make a simple enjoyable film of 10 minutes or so.. but then as time went by, the land of Hollywood came in and hundreds of people were required to make a single movie. In the 90s, we had indie efforts like the Blair Witch Project that took movies back to small teams again.. could we experience the same with computer games one day?

I know I just sound cynical, and I am ready for the 'Troll' and 'Flamebait' moderation points, but I just don't feel it's such a great time to be in the gaming industry right now.

Even as a -consumer- many of the games now are unoriginal and not as good (relatively) as they were in the 80s. Why is now such a good time?