My dad is going to be spending most of January off work recovering from an illness. I’d like to get him a video game for Christmas but the recovery is going to take a lot out of him so he’s probably not going to want to play for hours at a time. He tends to like action games, especially shooters. I was leaning towards a PC game although my parents do have a Wii and my dad would probably enjoy having his own game(although he’d need a game that doesn’t involve too much moving around). Any suggestions?
Crimsonland.
Any game that can be saved at will, right?
Pretty much, but which games are those? Or how do I find out?
Psychonauts can be saved anytime. It’s kind of “action/platforming” but is a great game.
Do they still make PC games where you can’t save at any time?
Maybe you should just get him Plants vs Zombies. 
Pretty much any Nintendo DS game for that matter can just have the lid shut and with the power on it holds the game.
Trine is a game that is action puzzle platform game, but does not rely on quick reflexes (till the last level, that is). It’s not a shooter, but it is worth looking into.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is available for Wii.
I was talking about Psychonauts. Is there a DS version of it?
:smack: For some reason I was thinking of “Scribblenauts” when you wrote that which I didn’t think was very “action-y” at all but at least was a DS game.
Borderlands is a pretty decent game, although with a heavier focus on gameplay than on story. The save mechanism is pretty good, though I played it on the 360, not the PC.
There’s also a lot of good shooters out there, of course. The original Gears of War is act-based and every act/chapter is pretty self-contained. (It’s also on the PC, with an additional act not found in the initial 360 version.)
But the biggest action-game of 2009 has to be Batman: Arkham Asylum. It has the added benefit of being absolutely huge in terms of content and looks pretty neat even on an average machine. (It played very well on my Gaming Rig anno 2006)
I’ll always recommend Left 4 Dead, and now Left 4 Dead 2. Gameplay is fast and furious, and you can just drop into an online game and drop right back out if you want to. The individual chapters are quite short, and a complete campaign should take less than an hour (although a very competitive Versus game can take a while). L4D2 also has Survival and Scavenge game modes, which are very quick.
In L4D, the emphasis is on teamwork; if you don’t work as a team, you will die. If he’s playing online, he’ll need a microphone.
There’s emphasis on teamwork on every game that you play online.
There are a hundred racing games that would prove you wrong. heh. But you know what I meant: if you don’t stick with your team in L4D, your game will be very short indeed.
Not -really-. Most games, the ‘penalty’ for not really being a “team player” is small to nonexistant - sometimes the best way to guarantee the best PERSONAL score is to ignore the rest of your team and go solo.
That won’t fly in L4D.