Wurm Online

First I'd like to say that Wurm Online is not everyone's cup of tea.  It is a very niche game but I think it is worth posting about because of my own satisfaction with it.

Wurm is a game about wilderness survival.  You start out in the woods with only a few simple beginner tools.  In order to progress and survive you probably want to find a place to make your own house.  You do this by building better tools that are needed to do the job.  For example in order to make a house you're going to need a mallet (among other things) in order to make a mallet you must cut down a tree, cut the tree into logs, cut logs into a shaft and carve a mallet head from a log then combine them successfully.  This of course makes the game very difficult, but it was goddamn satisfying to build my first shack even though it was no bigger than a closet.

Another cool thing is that every action you can do corresponds to a certain skill and the more you perform that action the higher your skill becomes and you become better at what you do.  Everything from fighting to building to mining out mountains has a skill.  Did I mention you can change and shape the environment as well?  You can dig to lower the ground or drop dirt to raise it. As such you can be very creative with the terraforming of your hut/base/outhouse or whatever.

Feeeed me noobs!

At first it may seem too complex and the interface is kinda confusing, but there are many other players that will answer your questions or even give you some tools to help you get started in exchange for being their indentured servant.  Stick with it for an hour or two and you'll get the hang of it.

There are three different servers as of now and one of them is completely free to play indefinitely, although it is quite a bit smaller than the others and your skills are capped at 20 instead of 99 but you can still have a good time and in fact it will take you a long while to max your skills at 20 anyway.  To play on the other two servers  (one peaceful and one is PvP) you have to pay 10 euros per month or pay in-game silvers.  So if you're good enough you could play on the premium servers for free.  Protip: you can go on the forums and sell your in-game referral for about 10 silver if you pay once for premium.

Anyway I hope you guys give it a try, as it is really alot of fun as long as you're not looking for non-stop action.  Oh and don't feel bad if you starve then get eaten by a rat, it happens to all of us...

Video kinda cheesy but it showcases the game well.

Alien Swarm (Free Steam download)

Alien Swarm is an isometric third person shooter developed by Valve.  After joining a game or hosting your own you get to choose from 8 different characters and 4 different classes, each with their own unique abilites, strengths and weaknesses.  It then plops all of you down into a space station teeming with icky crawling aliens.  Each map has a different objective that you must complete while you battle and try to stay alive.  Some of the later levels get quite difficult so I suggest teaming up with others.

As you progress you will level up in rank, granting access to improved weapons and supplies, the key to victory is building a team with the right combination of these and working together (also not being caught by those damn little infester aliens).  My personal favorite: the tesla cannon, it shoots beams of jumping electricity and deals no friendly fire, aww yea.

Here is a link to the Steam website if you do not already have it.

Video Alien Swarm Gameplay.

Minecraft

for my first entry I will briefly talk about Minecraft.  If you haven't already heard about it you should definitely check this out.  Minecraft is free to play and there is also a pay to play version.  The idea is that the world is made of many different types of blocks.  These blocks can be destroyed, harvested, and used for building.  In the free version it is an open sandbox where you can create almost anything you can think of and show it off to people or play around in your little house.  Some people have even made entire cities or even replicas of things like the entire world of pokemon.  The pay to play version also has many other features like a survival multiplayer mode.

Heres a video of some people playing free version.
(EDIT: new video posted old one was taken down for some reason)