Best Arcade Game of All Time!

Having grown up at a time when the grocery store replaced the tube testing machine (yes, to test your television's vacuum tubes) with an Asteroid game, I can say that man, I liked all of them. I was terrible; there wasn't a single game I did well at, but that was largely because there wasn't a single one I wanted to abandon all the others to focus on. Hitting the Elmwood arcade with a pocketful of quarters jacked from my dad's coin bank was overwhelming. Where to begin? I'd often be thinking about what I waned to play next while I was still playing a game.

The arcade cabinet of After Burner that rocked back and forth and even banked left and right when you moved the flight stick. That was the tits.

After Burner had a goddamn seatbelt in the chair! What kind of boy didn't run for that machine when the seat was free?? I still wish that game was able to fully roll, that would have been something. There were always warnings near the back cuz you had to give it clearance if you wanted to watch it. The console can strike you.


Good call on Xenophobe earlier. Has anyone ever intentionally shut the door behind you to block your partner in with a room full of aliens? lol, i used to do that with the elevators and stuff ALL THE TIME

Oh man, don't even get me started on this topic. I could go on for days. I spent an enormous amount of time and money in arcades growing up.

I also have such nostalgia for the things around the games. Like tokens, which you often got a bulk discount if you put in a five dollar bill. Or putting a quarter up on the glass to reserve the next game. Knowing when the game paused to take a sip of your soda. The myths about games like reaching the mountains in BattleZone or a bonus for not firing in the trench in Star Wars (that one's true).

Gregarius wrote:

I also have such nostalgia for the things around the games. Like tokens, which you often got a bulk discount if you put in a five dollar bill. Or putting a quarter up on the glass to reserve the next game. Knowing when the game paused to take a sip of your soda. The myths about games like reaching the mountains in BattleZone or a bonus for not firing in the trench in Star Wars (that one's true).

When I was going to college, there was an arcade close to campus that offered an 8 tokens/dollar happy hour in the afternoon. That'd be when I would do the sitdown cabinet games, Pole Position and Star Wars. On Star Wars, I could get the 'no firing in the trench' bonus on the second level, but usually not the third level. You also got the bonus for killing all the towers, which was nontrivial.

I think by 1987, Nintendo was starting to kill the arcade business; at least the ones close to campus were dying. That could have very well been management failure, though.

A few years a go I treated myself to Arcade Legends 2 - which has 125 old school arcade games. So I frequently play Robotron, Berserk, and many others. There are some really old games on that machine - Ghosts and Goblins (I think that is what it is called) - a guy walking through main street of a small town where monsters are shooting and attacking him and you scroll a ball that points cross-hairs on the targets you want to shoot.

I have not seen or recall Elevator Action 2. And I don't know why!

Stargate with the 3-14 setting. I too loved Robotron, but Stargate was the pinacle. Damn near impossible to find now because it had five custom processors.

S.

ZMan wrote: A few years a go I treated myself to Arcade Legends 2 - which has 125 old school arcade games. So I frequently play Robotron, Berserk, and many others. There are some really old games on that machine - Ghosts and Goblins (I think that is what it is called) - a guy walking through main street of a small town where monsters are shooting and attacking him and you scroll a ball that points cross-hairs on the targets you want to shoot.

I have not seen or recall Elevator Action 2. And I don't know why!

Crossbow is the one you're describing. I used to love that game. They had a number of sequels, too, all starting with C: Cheyenne (in the old west), Combat (WWII), and I don't remember the others.

G&G was a side-scroller with a knight throwing a lance at bad guys. I was terrible at that one, but I got pretty good at the sequel, Ghouls & Ghosts.

I echo a lot of the games listed, and like a few others, Street Fighter 2: CE was my favorite of all the arcade games I've played.

I still remember how competitive it was... one time I was threatened by the guy I was playing against (didn't know him) because I threw him in the game. There was all these unwritten rules at the time.

After that I got heavily into Mortal Kombat and have fond memories of tournaments that were held at local video stores. Good times... but after 1994-95 almost every arcade in the city shut down. Home consoles killed em dead. Sad, but lots of good memories of biking down to the arcade, even if I only had a quarter.

Gregarius wrote: Oh man, don't even get me started on this topic. I could go on for days. I spent an enormous amount of time and money in arcades growing up. I was never particularly skilled at most of these games, but I liked to play, and some of my friends got good enough that I could enjoy watching them play.

I also have such nostalgia for the things around the games. Like tokens, which you often got a bulk discount if you put in a five dollar bill. Or putting a quarter up on the glass to reserve the next game. Knowing when the game paused to take a sip of your soda. The myths about games like reaching the mountains in BattleZone or a bonus for not firing in the trench in Star Wars (that one's true).

Same here. From about age 12 to age 18, I was seriously into arcade games, and so were most of my friends. The only thing that finally broke my addiction was the party scene at college that took over my social life for three years.

Nostalgia is a huge factor in any discussion about arcade games. I don't think it's even possible to have a completely rational discussion about the best game, because the really big factors are what games were available, especially at that age when we were most into the games.

Some games that I enjoyed, but not enough to put on my own top 5 list:
Punch Out - loved the oof look on an opponents face when I hit him with a solid body blow.
Star Wars - would have played it more, but it was unusually expensive compared to most games
pinball - esp Black Knight and Xenon for the comedy value
Tempest
Bagman
Frogger
some domed hockey game with foosball-type levers and nearly 2D hockey players that would pivot 180 and slide up and down the table.
Gauntlet
some game about landing on the moon [edit: Lunar Lander]
some pvp tracball football [edit: Atari Football] game where the players were represented as Xs or Os; once spun the tracball so fast that my thumb got caught and I lost a small chunk of it while pulling free
some pvp spaceship game [edit: Spacewar] - one ship looked like the Asteroids ship and the other looked like the Enterprise
some big multi-player demolition derby game - up to 8 people could play at once
some night driving game [edit: Night Driver]

My top five, complete with usual playing location for the full nostalgia trip:

runner-up: Dragons Lair - played this at an arcade on the edge of campus during my first semester of college. The gameplay was pretty minimal, but the animation was great and I enjoyed discovering new ways to die.

#5: Pac-Man - there was a pizza place about two blocks from my high school. It only had a few arcade games, but one was a sitdown version of Pac-Man. My best friend and I would go there after school at least once a week and sit at that game for a couple of hours, eating cheap pizza and playing Pac-Man.

#4: Food Fight - Played this at an arcade/pool hall that later turned into a trendy nightclub. I wasn't good at this game, but it was just so much fun to play, flinging food at opponents. It felt a little like being in a Warner Bros cartoon. My best friend got really good at Food Fight, and we discovered that the game had a much steeper difficulty curve than most arcade games, to the point where higher levels sometimes played out in just seconds. One time he was playing that game at scary fast speed and that seemed to cause a brownout in the arcade, causing everybody's game to crash. A manager rushed around giving out free tokens to everybody. A week later, the same thing happened while my friend was playing Food Fight at a different arcade in a different part of town, and I was witness to both incidents.

#3: Missile Command - Always played this one at the bowling alley after our high school intermural team would finish our weekly game for the afternoon. The Cold War cast a grim shadow over my angst-ridden teenage years, and somehow playing Missile Command felt like a way to cope. Nuclear War? Let's just do it. Fast, brutal, and ending in annihilation.

#2: Battlezone - My favorite place to play this one was at the indoor Farmers Market downtown. Hop the bus with friends, get Chicago-style coney dogs with all the works for lunch, followed by some kind of big pastry and then Battlezone. Oh how my dreams were haunted by that stark landscape, with the slowly turning, swiftly gliding tanks, the ghostly saucers and angry buzzbombs. In my mind, it was like playing inside the Dark Side of the Moon poster. I couldn't finish watching the video at the start of this thread, because my hands kept instinctively grabbing at non-existent controls.

#1: Asteroids - This was my other favorite at the bowling alley, though I would play it anywhere. This was my best game. I knew about the saucer hunting strategy but found it boring. I preferred to hurtle and zip about quickly and chaotically, while spinning a lot and mashing the shooting button like a madman. The saucers had a tough time shooting at me, but I would periodically get overconfident and smash into an unanticipated rock when I traveled off one edge of the screen and onto the opposite side.