I'm finding myself enjoying the point and click/hidden object games. Relaxing/tells a story/puzzle solving and atmosphere.

- I currently have Dire Grove and Sleepy Hollow.

- I recently bought two adventure games called Adam's Venture 1&2. I've been playing through the first and its enjoyable. No combat but it uses the Unreal Engine so it has nice visuals and physics. Tells a good story and uses Bible stories and scripture. Set in the 1920s.

- Terraria 2d side scrolling platformer that lets you mine and build from your materials. Has combat but its more akin to old nintendo games. Cheap on steam.

- I haven't tried it myself but Minecraft sounds like your thing too. I'm interested in getting it.

Minecraft is great. I played back in the free days, and my brother owns the current version. Easily the kind of game where you can waste hours making the world just the way you want it.

I'm usually pretty exclusive to sims (RoF, IL2, SH5) but I picked up Mass Effect cheap ($7.95)just after Christmas... it's been a lot of fun.

I'm not a shooter type player at all, and I like that in Mass Effect you can hit the space bar, pause the game and set up the attack. Until I figured that out I had trouble with the husks at the first "tutorial" stage, but since then it's been a lot of fun... gorgeous game with a decent story and great voice acting. I'm about 2/3 of the way through ME amd I'm looking forward to picking up ME2 when I finish it. I may wait until ME3 comes out in March, there might be some deals.

I like adventure games too, if I were to recommend only one it would probably be Riven (the second Myst). I'm currently playing The Book of Unwritten Tales with my 6-year-old son... it's quite good and has more humour (well... the Myst games don't really have any humour).

Yes you do! That's the DEFCON game I mentioned. Your kill counts are in the millions. LOL

The latest version of Fritz Chess would be nice.

Bookworm Deluxe from Popcap Games is an addictive time-waster if you like that sort of thing.

Or how about BridgeIT or Pontifex from Chronic logic? Design bridges, build them, then test them to see if your design was good or if you'll fall to your death.

You could also pick up 18 Wheels of Steel: Extreme Trucker 2 and relax on the road.

Cheers!

Rick...

The Fallout game I recommend is Fallout 1 and 2. They are 2d-isometric turn-based RPG games. Fallout 3 IMO did not capture the Fallout universe, it was just Oblivion with guns and VATS and set in the Fallout setting.

Should be cheap now from GoG.

I'll second Skyrim. Its great just exploring the woods hunting and listening to the awesome score to the sound of wind blowing through the pine trees and watching clouds drift through the cold high mountains. But you can't stay away from the awesome combat. I just unlocked my last word of my three-word dragon tongue phrase that allowed me to shout a cave bear down a hill with my voice!

Fallout 1 & 2 are great choices. I found the writing (humor, culture references, references to previous Fallout games, etc.) in New Vegas to be of nearly the same quality as Fallout 2. I liked New Vegas a lot more than Fallout 3. Recently I've been playing mostly Skyrim and Arkham City, both are quite a bit of fun. Also like the STALKER series.