Absolutely love Shift 2. I feel like it really captured the intensity of Battlefield 3, but transposed to the Racing genre.
Recently revisited it on the Steam Deck and was worried that it wasn’t going to be as good as I remembered, and I’m pleased to say that it has remained every bit as amazing as it was.
Also makes me wonder what the hell simcade games have been doing the last 14 years. Nothing else really matches the sensation of speed and intensity that Shift 2 has. It’s also weird to me that the reactive helmet cam is not a staple in every single racing game.
Garry’s Mod
It’s hard to think of any one mod that got remotely close to changing a game the way GMod did for HL2/CS:S/source engine titles. I spent thousands of hours in GMod as a kid, it added infinite teplaya ility to the HL2 campaign, forums like Facepunch and PHWOnline became my second home. There was a ton of content to be loaded from there and FPSBanana, the thriving webcomic scene was truly special.