Hond

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.

Thanks, very thoughtful reply!

Agreed, VR is pretty awesome and owning a Pico 4 i can confirm its a pretty good headset on the budget side. With a bit of criminal energy even most of the quest exclusives like RE4 VR work on the Pico. With WiVRn it works even on Linux for PCVR which is pretty awesome. But atm i use it mostly for watching movies. I’m playing VR since 2019 and kinda seen almost every wortwhile game. Especially PCVR is imho in a pretty sad state nowadays when it comes to new titles. Meta bankrolled a few exclusive bangers in the last few years but even that seems to have come to an end sadly.

Last fall/winter i had a pretty good run with https://retroachievements.org/ and played through 6-8 classics. Titles are pretty well tagged so its easy to find something which speaks to you and they can be added to your “want to play” list. Never was a big fan of achievements but for this retro stuff it gave me the sometimes needed additional carrot on a stick. What helped me is to order the games to average completion times(not mastering times) and find games which take 5-10 hours. Having bit sized experiences felt less like a big commitment.

Tbh, recommendations algos never really worked for me. Even before everything got enshittified. I always just used brute force and the filtering options which were given to me. But even the steam store page started to actively discourage my approach for discovery with ui/ux changes a few years back.

But my backlog grows and the time for gaming melts away as i get older. Sometimes i miss skimming through hundreds of games to find a hidden gem. But currently i’m not even in the mood for gaming since a half a year. I havent finished a single game i was excited about. Just stopped after playing them for 2-3 hours.

Would i use an algorithm which actually recommends games i like? Sure.