Don't start WoW again. It'll only distract you from TOR.

They certainly can be. My other hobby, photography, makes PC building seem miserly though. :P The camera body I have now with a fairly basic lens cost $1,200 and that's not that high on the spectrum. The last lens I bought was about $300 and I got a good deal on it. Plenty more lenses and other accessories to buy for various situations. Makes the PC seem cheap to me. :Praven_squad

I can relate to you there. I'm a guitarist of 10 years, and when the only guitars and amps that appeal to me anymore start at $2000, suddenly a new $300 graphics card doesn't seem so ridiculous.

That being said, I'm getting pretty close to justifying an upgrade. As beefy as the E8500 is for a dual-core, it's gradually becoming obvious that my CPU and chipset are bottlencking my system. I'm certain I'd get a noticeable performance increase with the GTX 480 I'm already using if I upgraded my CPU to a decent quadcore as well as a motherboard that could support it.

This game doesn't require an earth-shattering PC the way Crysis did. That card is above and beyond what you'll need. I'm running a GTX 480 that I bought a year ago, and aside from the spurting and sputtering of a poorly optimized beta build, I'm getting 60 fps. And that's on top of having a borderline-outdated mobo and dual-core CPU. You can relax.

I seem to recall killing IMMENSE hours in the original Crysis campaign, and the Warhead campaign, though definitely shorter, was no slouch either. I'm typically ALL about the competitive multiplayer, but Crysis is one of the very, very few games in recent memory that I could sit and literally get lost in. Not to mention I've replayed both campaigns 3 times at least.

Crysis MP/Crysis Wars never truly caught on. Sad, too, as I always felt the MP components shared some of the larger open-world traits of the campaigns, which helped set the MP apart as well. Unfortunately, hacking became prevalent, and even immediately following the Crysis Wars launch, 95% of the servers I'd find with any population were European, thus subject to peak hours far removed from my own, not to mention outrageous ping.

By all means, soak up those campaigns in all of their gorgeous glory. Years after release, I still do. But if it's MP you're looking for, either jump into Crysis 2 or prepare to be massively disappointed.

Man...I want to love this game so bad. But all of the horrible clipping and flickering going on with the engine...I remember Repi tweeting about what an intensive task it was to patch it all up after the release of BFBC2. For some reason, I took that to mean the new Frostbite engine would be a bit more polished out of the gate for BF3. Sadness.

Oh well, I'll just keep myself amused until launch with the Crysis 2 ultra patch that I've just been informed I'm at least 2 months late on.

I'm pretty new to the digital audio aspect of gaming and I find it much more complex than video, so I'm a bit lost. I just hooked up my new Logitech Z-5500 system to my PS3 and I can't get it to run correctly. Whenever I have the system hooked up and turned on, the video of the game is completely destroyed. The XMB is fine, but once I try to play a game, my TV goes a little crazy and flickers violently, almost like it's cycling through resolutions trying to find the right one. For a couple seconds at a time I'll get picture but for the most part it's flashes of snow and a blank screen.

The system is a Logitech Z-5500 and my TV is a Sharp Aquos, which I connect my PS3 to via HDMI. I've gone through all of the settings on the PS3, video is set to HDMI like usual, and audio is set to optical, since I run a digital audio cable directly from the PS3 to the receiver of my surround sound. It's quite troublesome since it makes gaming completely unplayable, whether or not I'm playing from a disc or a game saved on my HDD. When I connect via optical to my 360 it runs perfectly fine with no problem, but I was much more excited about playing my PS3 with surround so this is killing me. I've googled this topic to death and can't find anyone else who has had the same problem, hopefully someone around here can at least give a direction I could look in. Thanks for your help, bretheren.