An interesting note here for those of who who like Minecraft: There has been another sandbox game called Dwarf Fortress out for a while now, which Notch said he used as a big inspiration for Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress lets you build out your world in millions of unique ways, liquid flow mechanics are accurate, gravity, civilization actions, pretty much everything.
However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.
Dwarf Fortress definitely deserves a plug - its run by a two brother team and the game is... hard. They currently earn through donations and are able to keep themselves plugging along.
The games ambition is to simulate an entire fantasy world, literally. His recent update was on the lines of:
" Now you can take rock nuts, for instance, mill them into a nut paste, then put them in a screw press to get oil (into a jug) and a press cake. Both of these can be cooked and the oil can also be made into soap. The press cake shouldn't be as yummy, probably, or maybe it should be restricted as animal feed, but currently it is just food. Jugs are currently anything but clay pretty much, and clay is the next step." - (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html)
The game procedurally generates a world, identifies different types of biomes, soil layers, weathers the terrain, flows rivers, amongst other pre-start activities. After that it populates the world with civilizations, and simulates interactions, wars, kidnappings, interactions/fights with monsters/demons, for about a 1050 years before presenting you the world to do what you will.
I recently tried to get into DF.
I downloaded the lazynewb pack and tried for hours to get it to run at a proper resolution.
The window would never size to what I had set it in the config editor as included with the pack or with manual editing.
Looking at the list of what's included with lazynewb, I really don't see much in there that I'd expect to reduce the difficulty for a new player. Plenty of utilities and such for making the interface easier to understand, but the gameplay mechanics are untouched. I'd say you're far better off with a good tutorial (even better, someone who can help you in person).
I had a similar experience the first time I tried it. It was unplayably slow, but now I can get a solid framerate. Check back in a few months, the DF guys seem to be making some progress in performance, etc and the next build might fix your issue.
However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.