Henk-Jan Uijterlinde

I got into gaming the way a lot of people my age did: an old MS-DOS computer that had no business running games, handed down from a colleague of my father's. Mario ran on it anyway. I started sprinting home from school to play. That was it. Thirty years later I'm a software architect living in the Netherlands with my wife, two kids, and a Swiss Shepherd who has no interest in gaming whatsoever. The career in IT was always downstream of that first computer. The gaming never really stopped, it just changed shape. When I had the time and the reflexes, I played competitively. Call of Duty, FIFA, Need for Speed, Gran Turismo. I owned every PlayStation from the first one through the PS5, an Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now a Series X, both Nintendo Switches. I was good at games when being good at games was something I had hours to work at. That era ended when the kids arrived, and I've made peace with it. What replaced it is something I actually prefer. I have a group of friends I do regular LAN parties with, playing on laptops (mostly non-gaming hardware, which is a practical detail that shapes a lot of what I cover). Left 4 Dead 2, Age of Empires 2, Overcooked, Payday, FlatOut, Red Alert 2. Games that run on modest specs and work with six people around a table. Online, I play co-op with the same group over headsets. Helldivers 2 has been the current favourite. It rewards actually knowing the people you're playing with. Solo, I've moved almost entirely into open world single-player. Horizon Forbidden West came with the PS5 and pulled me in. Ghost of Tsushima is one of the best games I've played in years, partly for the combat, mostly for what it felt like to walk through a historically grounded world that someone clearly cared about building. Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, Assassin's Creed. Fantasy and history are the genres I keep returning to, in games as in everything else. My wife is not a gamer. The one exception is It Takes Two, which she played through with me entirely because the story held her attention and the controls didn't require a tutorial. I think about that game a lot when I'm assessing how accessible something really is. "My wife finished it" is a more useful data point than most review scores. I started this site because I was tired of spending twenty minutes searching for my next game and coming up empty. The roundups I found either didn't match my situation (a 36-year-old with limited evenings, friends on non-gaming hardware, a partner who'll play exactly one game per year if I'm lucky) or they were clearly written by someone who plays games for a living and has no memory of what it's like not to. I wanted recommendations from someone in a similar position. That's what I try to write. Not hype, not press release language, not enthusiasm I haven't earned. Just an honest answer to the question: is this worth your time, for your specific situation, with your specific constraints? I play on a PS5 connected to a Samsung QD-OLED, use a SteelSeries headset for online sessions, and test low-end PC recommendations on a standard non-gaming laptop on purpose. If it doesn't run well there, half my LAN group can't play it. That's a real standard, not an editorial one. If a game isn't holding my attention I stop playing it. My time is too limited and my backlog too large to finish games I do not fully enjoy. I'll write about that honestly when it's relevant, because I think most people reading a games site are also not finishing everything they start, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.