Sorry if this was already mentioned.
You guys have got to try out a great game called uplink. You play a hacker, but its pretty complex, at first the main goal of the game is to get money, but then that switches and a storyline comes into play. There is lots of fun stuff, upgrade your hardware, your system, or your software. There are ranks, and an IRC chat for players. The game gets pretty hard, and will keep you going for a long time. I know I sound like a salesman, but seriously, I'm hooked, I've been playing it for 3 days straight, (there goes my xtra long weekend). You can hack LANs, take loans, steal money from people, give people bad grades, get people arrested, or get people pretty annoyed by changing their records to read legally deceased.
The game is buggy though, so patches come out every once in a while, sometimes you can do nothing but start over, its can get frustrating.
And their forums are pretty big too, lots of helpful people there. You can check it out @ introversion.co.uk
