Hond

Idk, i feel like the AAA gaming industry put themselves already in a pretty unsustainable path for the last decade. With or without the several consumer hardware crisis we had a long the way. That constant push for even more graphical fidelity doesnt provide better experiences anymore but drives the costs up to stupid levels(hundreds of millions). I’m an enthusiast and i can spot the differences and advancements we made even in the last 5 years. But i dont think the results as impressive as they can be are really worth it. We’re at a place where we can boot up games with particularly well crafted artstyles which are 10 years old which look better than currently released AAA titles with lesser visions. But i can also boot up 10 year old games with for their time average looking graphics and forget about the slighly less shiny lighting in 5 minutes when the gameplay doesnt suck.

But even if we entertain the idea that consumer hardware pogress stalls and we only buy replacements parts with equal performance we would still have an industry which pushes the software side forward. Consoles are the best examples where we see considerably better utilization of the hardware over the years by game devs.

With all that said: Fuck the AAA industry. They can implode for all that matters to me. In this regard i consider the “good” times over since roughly 2013 with the hyper monetization, dlcs, mtx, gambling, live services, kernel level anti-cheat, kernel level drm, revokable licences, fomo mechanics, etc. But there will always be small studios and indie devs which will release new and fresh games which run on potato.

There are so many games i want really everyone to experience like Beyond Good & Evil or Psychonauts.

But i’m a racing game enjoyer at heart. So i’m going to namedrop NFS 3, 4 and the Test Drive Unlimeted PS2 version. The last name drop is no joke. Its the very best PS1 racing game physics which happen to be on a PS2 i ever experienced but on a ridiculously big map.

But the ultimate arcade racing game is imho Midnight Club 3. I grew up with the NFS games on PC. Through the years i went hardcore on racing sims. Have been an elitist. But this game pulled me back to the fun(complete lie, but i was told to sell the game to you, but i truly believe it would have been good enough to actually do that). But seriously i never had a PS2 when MC3 was relevant. Emulation of the PS2 took a really long time to render MC3 flawlessly. But now in 2026 its just great. You should really check it out if you have any itch to play a great arcade racer. It does so many things which feel so fresh to this day. So many events have unique scripted things happening. Its crazy that this still stands out over 20 years later.