Best pc arcade games list

Throw 8-cabinet multiplayer into the mix, and Daytona USA rightly earns its place among the most well respected racing games of all times. In poor taste or otherwise, Operation Wolf was an addictive, frenzied shooter, letting a player take on enemies via a fixed pivoting optical controller that looked remarkably like an Uzi submachine gun.

Doing away with many of the excesses of the fighting game genre, it focussed on hand-to-hand combat instead of projectiles and flashy specials, letting the king of the combo seize the day. It also looked fantastic, with character models that put rival Virtua Fighter to shame.

Smash TV was crazy. Taking the multi-directional, twin-stick shooting idea of Robotron, it put you in the middle of an ultra-violent video game, tasking you with mowing down literally hundreds of enemies per bout. Quick reflexes and crowd control techniques were needed to beat this game, while a heavy dose of satire made you smile all the way through.

Ripped off by everything from Burnout to GTA, Crazy Taxi had you breaking every rule of the road while trying to make as much money ferrying passengers around as possible. Which were, incidentally, amazingly adept at avoiding being crushed beneath your motor. Neo-Geo games were the creme de la creme of 2D sprite gaming in arcades in the mid s. The attention to detail, from character animations to lush background art, was second to none.

Metal Slug married that with fantastic and darkly funny side-scrolling shooting action too, with chunky weaponry and the eponymous Metal Slug tank letting you plough through enemy lines. Street Fighter may have mastered the one-on-one arcade fighter art, but Mortal Kombat had the guts to do things a little differently. Quite literally too — gore and viscera were liberally thrown around the screen as you knocked seven shades out of your opponents, concluding in Fatality finishing moves which saw you rip the still-beating heart out of a foe, among other unpleasant ends.

Naturally, it was a smash hit, leading to an insane wave of controversy and political discourse around the moral worth of video games. It fiendishly let you put in extra coins to top up your health as you played too — a far more tempting offer than dumping your change at the continue screen, making this a real pocket-money eater.

Frogger was a frighteningly addictive game about amphibian mortality, seeing you guide a frog across motorways and waterways. Revived recently on mobile as spiritual successor Crossy Road, the original is still the best.

Think e-sports is a new phenomenon? Think again. Golden Tee Off had a unique trick up its sleeve though — a kinetic trackball built into the cabinet that had to be rolled at speed to pitch and putt the ball. This simple interface gave it the Wii Effect, making even your non-gaming dad give it a go. A staple of the US bar circuit, the ubiquity of Golden Tee lead to nationwide, prize-money tournaments.

Forget Horizon Zero Dawn. A platformer that saw you trapping baddies in bubbles before jumping on them to send them off into oblivion, it paved the way for multiplayer titles like Towerfall Ascension.

And it had a cracking theme tune too — give it a whirl on YouTube, and we challenge you to not be stuck humming it for days. When the 9-to-5 world is getting you down, the suit collar chafes and the office tower blocks are blocking out that beautiful blue sky, sometimes you just want to tear it all down, Kong-style. Rampage let you do just that. A comical take on classic monster movies, it let you scale and smash down skyscrapers, take on the army and nab tasty onlookers as a quick snack in the guise of a giant snarling beast.

The follow-up to the less well remembered Renegade, Double Dragon is perhaps the most famous side-scrolling brawler of all time. Playing as two martial art master brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee, you stalk the mean streets laying the smackdown on nefarious gang members. It was one of the first games to let you knock a weapon from an opponent's hand and use it against them, too, adding an extra layer of strategy to encounters as well as letting you get a cheap shot in on your co-operative partner.

A racing game with attitude, it had you racing pick up and monster trucks around hilly, jump-filled dirt tracks. It had amazing visuals Micro Machines took a thing or two from this , while its unique stand-up cabinet let three players face off on one screen — and still have a wheel each to drive with.

One of the most iconic arcade games of all time, Space Invaders was also one of the most stressful. With its clever sound effects increasing in speed as the waves of alien foes moved purposefully towards your spaceships fortifications, it was a race against time to blast your foes into oblivion.

Revamped and released many, many times, its memorable alien baddies are as famous as gaming itself. This is one of the all-time greats. Asteroids gave you unprecedented control over your craft. They changed it because they thought Puck-Man would be too easy to vandalize, you know like people could just scratch off the P and turn it into an F or whatever. The challenge here was whether you could convince your mates to actually play it because obviously, you were waaay too smart to try and defeat a death curse.

Did you ever hear the one about the frog that wanted to cross the road? In though, it was all about getting your very own Kermit to make it across a busy road without getting squashed — which was way harder than it sounds.

According to research carried out by the developers, more women played Pac-Man than men, making it the first commercial video game to appeal to a female audience. So, after the success of its yappy yellow hero, Midway went back to the well one more time and released the even more popular Ms. Pac-Man , which was very similar to its predecessor just with a lot more hairbows and swooning. It is as iconic a title as anything Nintendo has ever published since and remains a firm favourite for competitive gamers.

Joust, which is enjoying a revival thanks to the frequent references to it in Ready Player One , is the game most people remember for popularising multi-player gaming.

Simplistic in design, but incredibly difficult to master, Joust was developed by Williams Electronics , a company which prior to had been most notable for its fortune-telling and pinball machines. Star Wars games are a dime a dozen these days, but back in , they were a little less common.

Aesthetically this arcade offering from Atari Inc. Chances are, if you played Tapper the first time around, then you were probably drunk. Spotting the potential for success with kids, Tapper soon became Root Beer Tapper and found its spot on the sticky floors of the arcade, somewhere between Donkey Kong and Pacman. Even the most iconic heroes had their starting point. Mario Bros. Surprisingly, Mario Bros.

Animated by the iconic Don Bluth , it was a stunning piece of arcade gold, complete with a brave knight hero and a gorgeous princess to save. After years of blasting aliens in far-off galaxies, it was a breath of fresh air for gamers to finally get a chance to handle some of the greatest flying machines of the World War 2 era. Quite the opposite.

Gauntlet became one of the most influential and important video games ever made, turning geeks into Gods overnight. Ikari Warriors may have been lacking its own submachine gun attachment, which had helped make games like Operation Wolf so appealing, but it did have a rotating joystick meaning players could run in one direction and shoot in another.

Most kids these days probably only know Rampage as a movie starring Dwayne Johnson , but for those of us with a few more miles on the clock, Rampage was an awesome arcade video game in which players took control of 1 of 3 giant monsters intent on smashing the shit out of various cityscapes across America. Out Run was the video game of the year, selling an unprecedented 20, cabinets in its first year alone.

No surprise when you lay your eyes upon the sleek, shiny body of the first-ever sit-down deluxe driving cabinet. Who can forget the temptation of the added Uzi, attached to the Operation Wolf cabinet, calling out to kids all over the world like a submachine gun siren?

For many of us, Operation Wolf was our first experience of a first-person rail-shooter and opened our eyes to the gritty realism of 2-dimensional, side-scrolling war. Well, well, well.

Our parents called it the coin-guzzler, as it feasted upon our pocket money hour after hour, day after day. But that was the truly great thing about this game — it had a neverending replay value because you just knew that with one more coin you could beat that ugly alien once and for all and make it to the next level.

Konami were world-beaters during this era of arcade video gaming, and their spin on the then white-hot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property was first class. Golden Axe provided me and my friends with everything we could ever have wanted back in — swords, sorcery and scantily clad babes.

Thank you SEGA. Mad Dog McCree was more like a movie than a video game, and it was also one of the most expensive games in the arcade. Developed by the legendary team at Capcom, the game capitalized on the success of Final Fight , rather than its own predecessor, which had been a commercial flop, and created the most enduring fight tournament known to man. Keep in mind, the fewer needed controls, the better.

I am able to play these on my laptop i5 2nd Generation. Here is the list we have gathered so far. I need your help to find more! Bold font games come highly recommended. They are well done and "arcade-type" in nature. Donkey Me. I was looking for a way to purchase a version of Fix it Feliz Jr with no luck.

Were you able to find it? You guys are killing me. So many games, so little time, So little HD space. Thanks for the suggestions all! I would love to upgrade it again so I can add back the other emulation but the PC Games I play often so it is a good trade off for me until I get the cash to upgrade the HDD. This is where i found it whilst browsing the FTP.. Thanks giga. Added cnoblen and njgx96's recommendations.

I will add brief descriptions for each title and other tidbits for the game list! Hey guys I'm a bit new to the PC Games portion No emulator required to emulate a PC, if I understand correctly.

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