For flight simulators, sports games, and some action games, nothing beats a high-quality joystick. There are several good one's out there now--the "Sidewinder" line by Microsoft is very good, as well as any joystick by "CH Products". Beware of bad joysticks! Try out the stick before you buy it--Comp USA and other computer stores usually put the available joysticks out on display. Look for sturdiness, and high-quality buttons. About the buttons--more is not necessarily better. If you play a lot of flight sims, you could consider a stick with a "hat" or "coolie". If you play fighting games like Mortal Kombat, consider a joypad instead of a joystick.
A good quality monitor is very important, because, obviously, if the monitor breaks, you can't use the computer (well, you can, but it's a lot harder). I can't give many recommendations, because my monitor has served me faithfully for the entire life of my computer.
The basic monitor size is 14 inches, which is probably adequate for most people. For true gaming greatness, however, try to get a 17 or 18 inch monitor. Warning: the price of monitors goes up by about 100 bucks for every inch, so consider a larger monitor only if you have the cash.
There's a lot of talk about Graphics Accelerators these days, which I will go into in more detail in a later article. Basically, my recommendation is to hold off on the 3-D accelerator when buying a new computer. You can always add one later if you feel like it. Right now, there are about a dozen 3-D accelerators out on the market, and it's too early to see which one will be excepted by developers of computer software. The drivers that ship with the card may be out of date and buggy and will require frequent updates.
Some sort of backup drive is a good investment--believe me, you will thank yourself when, and if, your hard drive crashes. There are a few different types of backup drives, including tape and optical. Tape drives are relatively in-expensive but slower, while optical drives can hold more, but are more costly. I bought a Iomega Ditto drive last year, and I am very pleased with it. I can fit my entire hard drive onto one 800 meg tape in about 2 hours. A backup drive is also a good alternative to a bigger hard drive--after you back something up, you can safely erase it from your hard drive, freeing up disk space.
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