I would suggest that you check out wine as an emulator for your Winows game. You can learn about wine and Windows games known to work through wine at:
 
http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=gtavice
 
I think everyone favors different Linux distros. For no particular reason, I don't think I'd be interested in Linspire. My first choices would be SUSE or Mandriva. I'm sure many others here will also have opinions as to which would be a beginner friendly Linux distro. You'll probably try many, before you find one you really like. Also, different distros will play better with your particular hardware.
 
A bit of reading at the different Wiki's will help you make choices to your liking. You could also check the Wiki for wine. A quick Google search for Wiki's of interest will lead you in an informative direction.
 
zenarcher

Linspire is a great distro for normal users who want a system (like you seemed to have purchased) that is pre-installed on a retail system.
 
The issue is that you have to see this as a Linux box, not a Windows box.
 
Frank's corner may be of some help, but from what I remember, the development packages are not in the retail version of these boxes that are sold. You need some of these tools to get Wine to work.
 
I suggest that you visit the Linspire forums and do a search on your games, or post a thread. The folks over there are very helpful and can guide you more easily, relative to Linspire.
 
Linspire dabbled with Wine early on, but dumped the project. However, many users have used Wine on these systems effectively. tap into their wisdom.
 
I also don't suggest that you dump Linspire totally for another distro. These boxes are built pre-compiled to use Linspire to detect and run the hardware on your system.
 
Try the Linspire forums first. You purchased a box with Linspire. Try to sort out the issues on the forums before making any drastic changes to the system first.
 
Let us know what you find out.