The new device in the house is an XBox. I’m looking for a game that Mrs. Likko will enjoy, which means one that we can play, live, together. Cooperative play would be better but she’s not opposed to competitive play. The game should ideally have a strong female character and good-looking, interesting backgrounds. She has expressed interest in puzzle-solving as well as action. But she’s unlikely to play a first-person game alone; she’s only likely to play a game with me or some other friend.
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There are a handful of answers to this question but the first ones might qualify as annoying because they all involve peripherals.
The absolute *BEST* co-op game ever in the history of video gaming is Rock Band (or Rock Band 2 or Rock Band 3). If you guys don’t want a living room full of plastic musical instruments however (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), then I’d suggest Dance Central (and Dance Central 2) for the Kinect (this game is one that we went *NUTS* over).
However! They both cost additional funds and the kinect might require you to rearrange the living room and that could well be crazy talk (but these games are games that will have groups of people inviting themselves to your house after they play them).
Okay! Assuming you don’t have a kinect or the desire to have a living room full of plastic instruments, there are two categories of games that meet your requirements. Shooters and non-shooters. There are a lot of shooters that have excellent co-op but only a handful with strong female characters. There is a violent one: Left 4 Dead. There is a non-violent one: Portal 2. (Well, the co-op isn’t *EXACTLY* female characters as much as robot characters but the main character in single player is female.)
When it comes to non-shooters, there’s the puzzly Viva Pinata (and its sequel Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise) as well as a large number of sports games (which, granted, don’t have strong female characters but…).
If you’re looking for strongish narratives, there are also pretty much *ALL* of the Lego games. Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Indiana Jones… these are fun platformy games that you guys can play together.
XBox Live has more games that are two player… popcap publishes a number of them (peggle, plants vs. zombies) and some of the magic:the gathering modes allow for multiplayer as well.
The problem is that the best games on the system for the stuff that she likes are single player games…
An action tower defense game like Dungeon Defenders might be a good idea, if dancing and music games aren’t Mrs. Likko’s thing. (Or if they aren’t your thing and you want to avoid them.) Dungeon Defenders has a strong female character, is co-operative, is quite pretty, and involves problem-solving – in that it is a third-person shooter with a tower defense component.
If you were looking for a more traditional shooter or puzzler, however, I would second Jaybird’s suggestion of Left 4 Dead and Portal 2. (The limitation with Portal 2 is that the co-op campaign has only a few hours of gameplay to it, with limited replayability.)