@doozie78: Don't tease me, man. "Q4 2014" couldn't come any slower because of ED.

@pelvist: "it takes some work" If you mean that you have to get lots of money or something, I wouldn't have it any other way.
What about mods? any comment on mods that X3 has that you would consider integral to a good experience?

The wait for Elite: Dangerous and Limit Theory (not Star Citizen though, as good as it's going to be, my PC will explode if I will ever dare run that beast on this machine) is killing me, and I NEED a space sim to calm my nerves down.

I'm also a spoiled brat in terms of graphics, so the older, pre-millenium space sims (which I hear are far superior to more recent ones) are out of the question.

Two games that are on my radar at the moment are X3 and X: Rebirth.

However, I hear that both of them feature some very apparent flaws, though I also hear that those flaws are somewhat remedied by mods.

To those of you who played these games - which is better, and what mods do you consider essential/very important in order to make them enjoyable are they worth it with those mods installed in your opinion?

Also, can you pilot capital ships in X3? not nearly enough games allow you to do that nowadays...

Oh my god, thank you so much! this is precisely what I've been looking for.
I guess I believed that the PC/mac discussion forum is mainly about hardware.

I see. Anyone else have a suggestion for a more recent time sink sort of game? I'm saying recent because I've probably went over most of them already.

@Lulu_Lulu:

Well, what games have to played recently that managed to catch attention in particular? What was the last game that you've played that made you think - "Huh, this is really good! I'm having a fair bit of fun playing this game!" or something along those lines.

That was the original question.

@Lulu_Lulu: This isn't Y!A and you're not my psychologist - either stay on topic, or don't waste your (and my) time, please.

I'm running out of options for PC games, since the triple A PC game line up of 2014 is pathetically small because everyone is busy milking the MMO market. This leaves people like me, who want to have a good, relaxing time playing a single player game, very disappointed. I haven't found any recent indie games that interest me either.

The only memorable recent triple A titles I can think of are Watch Dogs and Wolfenstein TNO - the latter, I've finished, and the former, well, we won't go into why I don't like it one bit.

Either way, I need an interesting game to burn time into until the next school year starts, or otherwise, the boredom will kill me. I've been occupied with Starsector for quite a while now, but honestly, until the game gets updated a bit, it's just getting repetitive now.

So I ask you this, good community members of Gamespot - what games have you played recently that really tickled your fancy, and that you've found yourself playing for a while?

I strongly doubt it. Judging by several monitoring programs, it seems that my 6850 is performing according to it's specifications.

I finally have the budget to buy a card that will be capable of keeping my rig in the game for a while longer.

It seems that the card that best suits my interests in terms of budget and performance is the GTX 780, which would be replacing my HD 6850.

However, I'm still running an old Q8400, which is slightly weaker than an i5, perhaps on par with an i5 if overclocked properly. While I won't pretend to understand CPU-GPU relations, what I do know is that having a really old CPU and a really new GPU may cause the GPU's performance to be hampered.

The question is, will my Q8400 bottleneck a GTX 780 if I were to install one? If it will, what's the cheapest CPU that won't bottleneck it?

On a slightly different note - if I install a GTX 780 and it does end up being bottlenecked by my Q8400, would it still be able to handle Watch Dogs on higher settings?