Padraic,
Going through this thread I would be confused too and I game a lot. I know an easy way to get into gaming that would allow you to test drive most of the games that have been mentioned for free. Get a Steam account, they are free, and look for demos. That way you can play different games for free to see what you might like to play. You can get started at store.steampowered.com/ just click the "install steam" link and then browse the store. You can view trailers for games and many of them will have demos available.
There is a large amount of abandonware available online too but they can be hard to deal with due to backwards compatability problems.
Going through this thread I would be confused too and I game a lot. I know an easy way to get into gaming that would allow you to test drive most of the games that have been mentioned for free. Get a Steam account, they are free, and look for demos. That way you can play different games for free to see what you might like to play. You can get started at store.steampowered.com/ just click the "install steam" link and then browse the store. You can view trailers for games and many of them will have demos available.
There is a large amount of abandonware available online too but they can be hard to deal with due to backwards compatability problems.