Graphics Card Upgrade

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my gfx card at uni.

First of all I needed to identify which bus my PC uses. CPU-Z is a useful little diagnostic utility which says I have PCI-E x-16

This means that I could go all the way to an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. Tempting!

Actually, given the price I’ve ordered a 512MB NVIDIA 8800GT for £89.29 inc. VAT and delivery from Overclockers.

Open / Shared Source Games for Research

I’ve been considering trying out my usability / user testing on open / shared source games.
Any recommendations for good games that I could modify in an attempt to improve the user experience?

There are some lists of Open Source and Commercial games on Wikipedia.

A quick search made me think of the following,

Frets on Fire / Unsigned / StepMania / UltraStar
Flight Gear
Homeworld (HW: Game of the Year torrent, HW+HW2 torrent)

Dope Wars
FreeCiv / FreeCol (Sourceforge rank 4) / OpenCity
Sauerbraten (Sourceforge rank 55) / Nexuiz / Aleph One / OpenArena / Tremulous / Doom / Duke Nukem 3D / Heretic / Hexen / Hexen II / Quake / Quake II / Quake II Arena
The Battle for Wesnoth
Nethack / Colossal Cave Adventure
UFO Alien Invasion (Sourceforge rank 45)
SuperTuxKart (Sourceforge rank 124)
BZFlag
OOLite
Osu!
PokerTH
Scorched 3D
Spring
Star Control: Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict
KAsteroids
PlaneShift
Marathon 2
Mech Commander 2

Some kind of Tetris / Space Invaders / Missile Command / Pinball clone

It would be good to get candidates from a broad range of styles, eg,

Windows / Web / Console games (such as homebrew on Wii or Xbox 360)

Bemani
Card / Board Games
First Person Shooters (single / multiplayer)
Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) / MMO
Puzzle Games
Real Time / Turn-Based Strategy
Role-Playing
Side-Scrolling / Shoot / Beat-em-up / Arcade Games
Simulation

A game that’s missing, that I’d love to make, would be a VI tutor a la Typing of the Dead (which, incidentally, is available on GameTap Gold and The Pirate Bay along with a NoCD crack.)

If I were to make my own game I’d need content assets, for which TurboSquid, CreativeCommons, and ShareCG might be useful.
This brings up an important issue: usability only relates to functionality, while user experience takes in the aesthetics – particularly the audio and visual aspects are something that I won’t ever have much input on (as I have no artistic skills!)