I am not a computer geek. I can barely turn a machine on and set up a simple word-processing page. As far as I'm concerned, RAM is a member of the NFL team that left my hometown of Los Angeles for St. Louis. And gigs? Aren't those what any hard-working musician needs to make a living?

No surprise, then, that I do not play computer games - at least I didn't until a month ago, when I rediscovered my medieval roots.

It started when I took my 8-year-old son to an electronics store to buy yet another cartridge for his Gameboy Advance. While I waited, a box on the shelf caught my eye: Medieval: Total War. The letters were bold above a picture of a mounted knight holding a broadsword. Then two more titles caught my eye: Stronghold, with a picture of a grim-faced warrior standing before a castle under siege, and Stronghold: Crusader, with an army of Christian knights in full assault mode.

"Rule your kingdom through four centuries of brutal Medieval warfare," read the advertising copy. "This is no time for the faint-hearted. ... Lead a determined group of crusaders. ... Wage war against a powerful foreign invader. ... The enemy prepares to storm the castle walls." And so on.

I realized that I'd read the same hype long ago in my baby boomer youth, when color televisions were rare and a boy's idle time was given over to baseball cards and comic books.

An advertisement on the back of one particular comic pictured battle scenes just like those on the computer game boxes. For $1 that ad promised me all the heroism and glory of King Arthur's knights.

I was hooked. I sent off my allowance money and waited for my armies to arrive. They did, but without castles, without flame-throwing catapults. They were nothing like the ad. They were just a bunch of plastic figures, each the size of my thumb.

I left the electronics store that day empty-handed. My son, of course, did not. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about those games. I still wanted Clydesdales in armor, chain mail and broadswords. I wanted to re-fight Agincourt, become Othello the Black Knight and stand triumphant upon the ruined battlements of Antioch.

So, I got hold of those computer games and entered a fascinating, ever-unfolding world of medieval warfare, real-time strategy and castle-building.

Unlike that old comic book ad, these $40 Windows-compatible titles delivered what they promised. Within days, I found myself squeezing in a few minutes before work, my eyes frantically jumping from the computer screen to the clock, my mind calculating whether I had enough time to lay one final siege to Antioch before I absolutely, positively had to get out the door. Early morning hours flew by as I tried to fend off the Duc de Puce, better known as The Rat.

Here's what I found:

Medieval: Total War (MTW to acryonym-happy computer folks) combines a complex battle system with equal portions of chess-like strategy and palace intrigue.

The Creative Assembly and ActiVision, who produced this title, already have Shogun: Total War in their catalog. Fans of that game should love the change of scenery to medieval Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, where 12 factions vie for dominance.

Battle tutorials, which are absolutely necessary to master the game's rudiments, are run by an impatient, mean-spirited general who takes pleasure in humiliating you in a rough English accent. He'll accuse you of wenching. He'll call you a "rat-eared whelp," an embarrassment to your father. Then he'll threaten you with the flat of his sword.

The animated battles are incredibly vivid, noisy and involved. An army of up to 10,000 can take the field in MTW, light-years beyond the world of thumb-sized plastic knights.

The simulation in MTW and Crusader can be sobering.

In MTW the dead remain on the field, giving you a real sense of the cost of your campaign. Anyone who doesn't want to emulate Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor or a World War I general at the Somme is forced to develop strategies that not only win but also save as many troops, knights and horses as possible for future battles. Trust me, victory feels more like defeat when only 128 of the 300 men you send into battle survive.

My son picked up one of the main differences between MTW and the Stronghold series, which was created by Gathering of Developers and Firefly.

Medieval Total War is especially strong in battlefield action. "You can just fight," my son noted. "On Stronghold: Crusader, you build things, then you fight."

In Stronghold, he added, "you can run your men all over and they don't get tired. In Medieval Total War, if you run them all over, they get tired."

That's a huge difference. Here's another: The dead disappear in the Stronghold series, which gives the field a sanitized look. All the carnage that goes with assaulting or defending a castle vanishes, though the castles remain.

And they're great castles, too. You can build your own elaborate fortresses or lay siege to a replica of a medieval bastion. Here, too, you need strategy, patience and a well-executed battle plan. The economic aspects of the Stronghold series are amazingly true to life. Building a castle requires resources, people and time. You can't just put up walls. You must acquire stone or wood, keep your people fed and happy and train soldiers. You have to manipulate food stocks and consumption, not to mention tax rates.

Again, you'll need to work through the tutorials and make several run-throughs. My first empire ended with something I can best describe as medieval urban sprawl - with no zoning.

I had dairy farms next to hovels that had to be smashed to make room for stockpiles. Though I had plenty of money, there never seemed to be enough space for the grand cathedral my people demanded. To make matters worse, I inadvertently restricted the food stocks, causing two catastrophic population collapses.

But I did learn a couple of hints to pass on: When all else fails and people start leaving, try doubling the rations, offering bribes and buying a dancing bear. Your people will be back in no time, with their friends.

Strategy books that sell for $19.99 can help refine these skills. And the three games have an army of devotees in cyberspace who swap strategies and hints, and engage in multi-player battles beyond my feeble skills (at least for now). But, I'll eventually join them - as soon as I dispatch The Rat, fight beside Saladin and find out if I'm as good as Henry V at Agincourt.