So, here we are again - comfy playing space, decent PC(s) (thanks honey! Hopefully you’ll get yours soon), all the time in the world, and… no games to play together. So, we’re looking for ideas in addition to some ideas we have of our own. Here’s the kind of stuff we’ve liked in the past:

WoW: this is a no-brainer and sets the bar pretty high. We spent about two years playing WoW, leveling multiple characters to 70, PvPing, raiding, and just hanging out. The problem with WoW at the moment is that we don’t feel like we have the time to raid and my interest has waned in favor of EVE. So, LotRO is one option we’ve been looking at that would fulfill many of the things we liked in WoW.

Team Fortress 2: We had some fun playing this for a little while, but it doesn’t hold our attention for very long at any given time. We pop back in every once in a while.

We found a few console titles to be a lot of fun. Beyond Good and Evil was a lot of fun both to play and to watch - it was easy to pass the controller back and forth and to do a little backseat driving. There are a number of other console titles that really try to fill the co-op niche of the puzzle variety that we never really got into. The Adventures of Cookies and Cream was one that seemed to be pretty perfect except that it was a little single-minded and direct - there wasn’t much to explore, there was little to no story. It really just boiled down into a series of relatively straightforward puzzles that required two people.

Some of the titles we’re looking into at this time:

Sins of a Solar Empire: the co-operative skirmishes could be fun if we both find the game systems appealing. We really won’t know until we try it or get a demo to putz around with. We had some fun playing co-op Civ 4 but the combination some technical problems along with the turn-based structure bored us relatively quickly.

Lord of the Rings Online: we tried this briefly in the past and saw some potential. The problems we ran into were that it didn’t run very well on our machines and it felt like we’d have more fun just replaying portions of WoW. We also started as humans and those initial zones really did nothing for us. We’ll probably check it out again and play as hobbits to see if The Shire is more appealing.

EVE: I’m going to do my best trying to find some aspect of the game that interests Sally. We were talking about this last night and, again, the concepts are very appealing to her, it’s the actual means to those ends that she can’t get fired up about. We’ll probably run some missions together and possibly throw together some cheap, expendable ships for some low-security ratting and PvP excitement at some point. My corporation may also have some fun events coming up that we might hop in on.

Tabula Rasa: Again, with better machines this might rope us in a little more. We tried the 3 day trial and enjoyed it, but technical aspects held us up some.

What else should we be trying?