Optimally different!

M and I have been playing BioWare games together as one of our preferred "ugh, we has no brains tonight" activities for almost as long as we've been dating, and it's been a lot of fun. True they're not two-player games per se, but the stories and character interactions tend to be just interesting enough, and the combat just monotonous enough, that we just periodically hand the controller back and forth, and debate every quest and dialogue option. The fact that we've done this for four longass games (Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Awakenings, Mass Effect, and now Dragon Age II) without murdering one another is, I think, one of the strongest signs about our relationship. :)

That said, we've been thinking of branching out (he says, shortly after ordering a copy of Mass Effect II), so I thought I'd ask for some recs.

I've been thinking about what I look for in a game, and the list I've reached for myself (and I think it's similar for M) is something like...

( Game ramblings ahoy! )

Soooo... yeah. I guess what I'm saying is: So far, BioWare has come the closest to having the formula right for me, but I'd kind of like to branch out. Any suggestions (needs to be available for the 360)? Games I've been considering include Arkham Asylum (not usually one for beat-em-ups, but the demo was interesting, and made M and I both nostalgic for playing Tenchu back in the day), Skyrim (really, this should be a no-brainer, but I tend to like to wait for games to come down in price, and Oblivion never grabbed me that much), and some other random RPGs that seem to have at least gotten OK reviews, like Kingdoms of Amalur, Two Worlds II, etc.

Whatchathink?

Edit Oh, also totally open to recs for actual co-op games. We've been enjoying Schizoid a lot, though it sometimes takes more brain than we have available in the evenings, and I feel like we should be enjoying Trine 2 more than we have. Probably worth another chance, that one.