Most "kids" these days play World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment - and even that game has very moderate system requirements, plus you have many options to reduce any graphical detail that you deem less important to you to improve the game's performance.
Same with Half-Life 2 and games based on it. You don't need most recent hardware to play it - especially HL2 and WOW really still look good enough on lowest detail levels to be fun to play (owners of an older computer aren't used to better graphics than that anyways). The first Counter-Strike: Source map I had perormance hits on full detail settings, was the one released for it yesterday: cs_militia.
The times were you needed a high end system to play a new pc game are pretty much over (the buzzword is "scalability"), because the difference in quality from a "middle class" system to a "bleeding edge" system doesn't really have that much of an impact on the gameplay experience anymore.
When it comes to the game itself, I played through the five tutorial missions and it was quite a bit of fun. I suggest you try the demo some time round instead of reading biased game magazines.
