My Favorite Arcade Games

As part of my continuing efforts to alienate people who read this blog for some "insight" into board games, I am again devoting this entry to a topic other than board games.

These arcade games aren't really listed in any kind of order. These are just the most memorable ones for me. Note: a lot of classic games (Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Defender, Pong, Donkey Kong, and so on) aren't listed. They are good games, but I've played them a lot on home systems when they came out (not that 2600 ports were entirely faithful) so they don't have the sheen that these 4 games do.

Dragon's Lair, SMASH T.V., X-Men (arcade), Dance Dance Revolution (DDR).

I suppose that you could argue against DDR being on the list (since it's been on home systems since it released), but the experience of playing in the arcade is vastly different to playing at home. Anyway, I made up the rules for this list and I can break them, too.

SMASH T.V. is just pure chaos on screen. So many enemies. So many directions to shoot in. Even a bit of a story (3 stages to complete). It's almost impossible to beat the game in 1 quarter, but whenever you lose your last life, you feel like you could have gotten through one more room if you'd played differently. Almost the perfect difficultly level for sucking quarters out of you.

X-Men is the game to play with friends. I have played it single player, but with 5 other players the game is a beauty. Mutant powers, tons of enemies. Display that's 2 screens side by side. Memorable bosses.