While I stoppped playing adventure games when they became impossible to solve without a hint book or finding a web site with solutions, I loved the babel fish puzzle. It was what puzzles should be - each attempt gave you a humorous response and a clear hint as to what you need to do next, and each step was solvable by logic. There are far too many games with puzzles that defy any logic - puzzles where there is absolutely no way anyone would solve the problem without help.
I think I still have an “I Got the Babelfish” t-shirt buried in a drawer some place. That, along with a MicroLeague Baseball t-shirt and a Chuck Yeager Combat Simulator baseball cap, are the only items of gaming-related clothing that I accumulated over the years.
Trinity. The number one game, absolutely.
Nobody has mentioned Starcross but I thought that one was pretty fun. It had a sort of generic sci-fi story, but the puzzles were interesting in that they involved using the same items repeatedly in different situations, in different ways… remember those teleporter discs? (As opposed to the usual “key/door” situation where the bucket is just a red card key and the well is just the red door, and when you tie the bucket to the rope so you can dip it into the well and get whatever’s in the bottom, that’s just you using the red cardkey to get through the red door. You know what I mean.)
Also I thought Hollywood Hijinx was fun, if somewhat arbitrary. Who can forget the Atomic Chihuahua From Hell mini-game? (though that did have the problem of “screw up, and you must reload, and you definitely will screw up”).
-J.