I've been playing Outbreak, the semi-forgotten online PS2 co-op Resident Evil spinoff with friends recently and I've had a great time, but it'd be fun to play the games with others as well, especially now that I have some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.
They're free, have low requirements (pretty much any semi-decent computer made in the last decade should run PCSX2 just fine) and you won't need to worry about exposing your Steam/Xbox/PSN/Nintendo username as you'd just be using a free Outbreak fan server account + an ingame alias and the game allows you to set up 3 different aliases per account.
There'd be no need for voice chat either if you want to have the classic PS2 Outbreak experience and rely on the ingame ad-lib system
You'd need
- PCSX2 (Windows, Linux, Mac), XBSX2, (On Xboxes with dev mode unlocked) a PS2 or a fat PS3
- Patched Japanese roms of Outbreak File 1 and 2 (easy to find)
- Memory card files with the required online settings files ( also easy to find)
- An obsrv account
Here is a tutorial video that goes over the setup process (for Windows). The memory cards mentioned above are linked in the description. Instead of patching the Japanese roms into English yourself, you can find them pre-patched on 💿Romance
if I figure out how to run PCSX2 on nixOS I would be down
PCSX2 has a Linux version so you should be good to go. (Steam Deck users can play the games online too, in case any are reading this)