Kim Justice's Top 100 Arcade Games of All Time

[Music] it's been a little while since i've done a top 100 and that one was for the games like i consider the very worst so today's one should be a bit different it should be something very close to my heart the arcade the arcade especially throughout the 90s from the beginning to the end was a big part of my life i did a lot of growing up in them i played an awful lot of them and i had all different kinds of fun whether as a bright-eyed little turd or as a teenager i've been meaning to do an arcade list for quite some time and well at last it's here the hundred games that at least for now represent the best of the arcade at least for the period that i'm comfortable with these are all kind of old after all the latest game here is from 2004 and it's a bit of an outlier but there's a good mix of everything from late 90s 3d technical fest to simpler golden age classics and naturally there's a lot of memories and sentimental things going on so don't forget that i didn't really try to put these games together based on things like technical power or their general importance or anything like that they're my games and it's loosely based on my experience i have no doubt that if i put this list together again even with the same 100 games a lot of things would have changed but i'm more other happy with what's here and with all that well we've got a hundred games to go through and we should probably start doing it let's go so this is certainly a game to start with i mean pit fighter isn't even that good it's an amusing mess of a digitized fighting game with a concept and story that's hilarious it's so cheesy it's as if someone made a tie-in game for a direct-to-video trash flick that would take pride of place in a red letter media video and yet at least in its arcade version it's a load of utterly mindless fun where you hammer buttons laugh at the various ridiculous characters everyone from the fat [ __ ] the 80s hair metal music video girl and the guy who's wearing nothing but chains into fun and generally enjoy themselves the home versions of the game may be bloody horrid in most cases but the arcade is still where it's at [Music] [Music] soccer ball is the first of a good few snk games on the list it didn't be wrong if they didn't have a whole bunch of entries really it's not exactly the most famous one or anything but there's always something appealing about a take on football that allows you to perform ridiculous super shots and also blast people rather than boringly tackle them it's kind of a take on their own more famous super sidekicks games but the future sports editions make soccer ball a fair bit more fun than those titles are for me [Applause] kick off now here's one of the few cases of a micro computer game actually coming to the arcade data east and ocean had a bit of an agreement going for robocop meaning that data east ended up in ocean's game with a few little changes to the arcade an odd state of affairs but the arcade certainly left a mark on me being a huge robocop fan growing up and everything seeing the movie is one of the first things i can remember even so you can imagine i was all over this as soon as i started going to the arcades the actual arcade itself is an okay enough side scroll although it's also an utterly gratuitous coin muncher but hey ho it's robocop and therefore it gets a place a few of the games in this top 100 are probably more familiar to me through their home versions than their arcade and renegade is definitely one of those but even if the classic zx spectrum version of renegade will always kind of feel like home it's still a bloody good arcade a very influential one where originally you played as a swishly dressed hot blooded high school teenager in japan this was the start of the kuniokun series the main guy in the western version may have utterly lost his dress sense but he can still throw mean punch and kick one of the starting points for beat-em-ups in the arcade obviously surpassed by a good few games but definitely plenty of fun [Music] [Music] here's a sweet little early arcade fighter from taito great swordsman gives you free attacks high medium and low and three settings for sword fighting fencing kendo and gladiatorial combat it's a little evolution from the likes of kuwati champ and all of that only with weapons and a little bit more forgiveness at least until you get to the one hit and you're dead roman stages but being able to block with your sword and the satisfaction of time in a nice lunge makes this one more of a call indeed to this very day as great as the nespionic commando is and it deserves tons of praise no doubt i do believe people tend to be a bit unfair on the original arcade which is a damn good arcade side-scroller enhanced by the ability to use a grappling hook to not just travel everywhere blind in speed but also boop enemies and generally push them around the awesome soundtrack helps too although it is even better when arranged by tim folen again this is another one where i first played the game on a speccy conversion and a good one at that this is a damn good game as well and i really think it should get more love [Music] tekken 2 being at number 94 is perhaps a reflection on the series getting better and better over time of course it's certainly a game i loved even if upcoming sequels kind of superseded it hell the first tekken wouldn't be too far outside the top 100. no one really talks about it at all anymore but i certainly remember the first time i stumbled across it in the arcade and was wowed by all the lovely 3d that was going on even more so than i was by the first virtue of fighter there's better things to come but all the hidden character unlocking combo throwing and general iron fisting is very strong in this sequel um i always enjoyed the subtle change bonanza brothers got in the west these guys aren't actual robbers no no no they're ex-thieves testing out the security systems of these buildings yep absolutely nothing sucks at all about that whether they're actually nicking everything or not this game's tons of fun a little odd for the arcade but it works while also being really nice and crisp looking well worth playing the arcade if you're more used to playing it in the home data east's game where you definitely don't play as james bond and that's totally your decision depending on the code you enter at the start is a fine example of what they do not necessarily the prettiest game but a celebration of all finns sidescrolling where you get on your feet get on a bike get in the sea and fight against all sorts of goons and bosses who again totally aren't doors or odd job it may have been a small miracle that they didn't get suited to oblivion by the broccolis for this but it was absolutely the best james um british secret agent game until golden eye came along [Music] [Music] mk2 is obviously great although weirdly my arcade love for the series kind of extends more to the original these days maybe because the computer's less of a cheating bastard in the original no matter though if you had friends and you didn't get told to piss off by teenagers you tried to take on like i did mk2 is a superb sequel where everything's bigger better and nastier the game that confirmed mortal kombat as something that was here to stay and wasn't just a bloody one-hit wonder it's fair to say that when it comes to 3d fighters i heavily favor namco's work over the others still it would be silly for me not to mention the impact of seeing virtua fighter for the first time bleary-eyed early in the morning at gatwick airport sometime in the 90s certainly wasn't enough to wake me up back then those sprites actually looked pretty damn real and even though you may laugh now it's still a very good fight to indeed [Music] enduro racer is the first sega superscalar title on the list and obviously it won't be the last these machines ruled the arcades for a good while this one here takes the almighty hand on and sends it off-road with the ability to wheely and do massive jumps that avoid rocks and hopefully don't send you flying off course hand into a road sign or whatever it's as fun and as energy pumping as most of the other big scalers bendetta this is one of those beat-em-ups that stands out for a different sort of reason rather than being bigger and louder than everyone else the key to vendetta is how much there actually is that's going on feeling like you have a whole load of different moves at your disposal all sorts of animations and so on if double dragon 3 was a game that seriously dropped to the ball and the combat tribes was the game that should have been a proper sequel to double dragon vendetta i think oddly feels like a double dragon sequel made by big fans even though it was made by konami it feels like it carries a lot of inspiration from technosis titles more so than others and it's certainly not as big graphically as other games from 1991 but it is bloody entertaining [Music] [Music] saint dragon another arcade game that first managed to get my attention due to a zx spectrum port that is actually pretty bloody decent one of the best 128k shooters on the computer still the actual arcade is great and to me easily the most fun of the various dragon based shmups out there where you have to use the tail in order to block shots and you are gonna need it because this game gets majorly tough however it's also a little less unfair than other similar games when it comes to power up retention after dying and it has a thumping soundtrack a great and very underrated game from trade west donkey kong is the first golden age arcade game in the top 100 and there'll be plenty more appearances from old masters don't you worry it's nintendo smash it's the first appearance of mario it's all of those things but yeah still excellent without taking any of the historical importance into consideration donkey kong was kind of before my arcade time so weirdly the main place i remember playing it for the first time was on a very good amiga homebrew port back in the 90s that i'm pretty sure was on a cover disk of some description the same applies to a couple of other arcade classics we'll see a bit later but con is one of those games that usually works out okay no matter how you play it especially when you get to hammer in those barrels [Music] one of sega's lesser known fighting games the last bronx is one that to me is severely underrated it's quietly one of their very best a weapon-based fighter that tries to be a bit more grounded than a lot of other titles in the genre with a large streak of downtrodden 90s tokyo running through it it's got a system that seems a bit too simplistic at first but really gets deeper and deeper as you play the game more again my preference for the weapon-based fighters leans towards namco but this is a damn fine title that deserves a lot more love than it tends to get since it usually gets barely any one of the most iconic most influential and certainly one of the loudest of all the golden age games williams defender is like most other williams games a complete assault on the senses that hardly got to where it was due to the superb play and also partly due to being the loudest bloody finn in the arcade punching you in the face with ear bleeding shots and kaleidoscopic explosions even now over 40 years later this game sounds like a venetian snares concert there's no subtlety about these guys and there's nothing that's not fun about bashing your head against this game sonic and uncompromisingly brutal brick wall much like robocop aliens is another adult movie that could be enjoyed by kids in coin up form although let's face it the kids no doubt had seen aliens anyway i mean i certainly did this is the first of several fantastic konami licensed tines that we're gonna see and even if ripley may have blonde hair for whatever reason even if the aliens have all suddenly got a putrid shade of pink it's a rocking and very playable side scroller from guys who are obviously pretty bloody good at side scrollers it wasn't going to be long before the list got its first classic capcom cp system beat em up and the punishers ready to deliver here at number 82. there's no real contest in the end these guys are the undisputed kins of the beat em up form and the punisher is a good first game to show off several of the reasons why no matter how long a single credit ends up lasting you you're gonna come away from this one satisfied you've beaten the crap or shot the crap out of a whole load of bad guys done some cool action set pieces and you'll generally feel like you've handed out a whole lot of justice capcom's formula was tried and tested their beat-em-ups didn't do an awful lot of deviating from it and it worked every single time of course side-scrolling beat-em-ups had a lot to thank this game for iom's kung fu master was certainly one of the first to reveal in the joys of punching and kicking enemies in the face in japan as spartan x this was a simple way to feel like jackie chan or bruce lee being that it's an odd mixture between chan's wheels or mills and lee's game of death the feeling is much the same in the western version even if the adaptation side is a bit more hidden away take lagoons on from all sides be fast on the button and avoid being hugged to death it's the sort of simple play that never gets sold the building blocks of sega's legendary super scalers went all the way back to their mechanical arcades with the likes of monaco gp not to mention earlier software titles like buck rogers and turbo but hanon was the first to evolve this concept into something state of the art for 1985 a game built by you suzuki to outpace all other competition particularly namco's pole position and it came with a full-size bike for you to lean on as well even if there's obviously more impressive scaler games including ones that came out only a couple of months after the original hanon this is a great introduction to the sort of intense technically impressive arcades sega we're gonna put out there with everything from the feeling of riding that bike down a track to the awesome hero karaguchi-led soundtrack that feels like whopper rock music as opposed to more traditional video game tunic we all used to love coming across arcade games in places that aren't arcades didn't we chief of monsters places was usually the takeaway and it always seemed as low neo geo games were the most common perhaps the versatility of the mvc system had a fair bit to do with that anyway aero fighters was the game of choice in our family's favorite chippy and when you've got five minutes to wait while the cods get in fried and you've successfully pestered dad for a spare 20p this lovely little vertical shooter is definitely going to hit the spot [Music] star wars may not have been the first licensed game in the arcades or anything like that but it's hard to think of any other licensed title from the golden age that came close to its importance it sure helps that it's based on the leading franchise of the day and all of that but this vector title excels in every way not just as a superb rail shooter but as everything you would pretty much want from a star wars experience the big death star explosion the speech samples the stabs of music and an iconic sit-down cabinet star wars has had so many tie-ins over the years and a whole lot of them are absolutely fantastic games but the 1983 arcade is still one of the very best [Music] [Music] rampage a game that reveals in glorious dumb simplicity you're a gigantic supernatural radioactive or whatever beast now go forth and knock down some buildings no one's ever gonna say that this game's play is deep and involved but it's got no interest in that we're here to stomp across america grab poor innocent civis and eat them and tear buildings asunder until the military inevitably puts a halt to proceedings leaving you a naked and rival embarrassed man awkwardly chucked back into the real world the designers of the game wanted to make something fun and casual where there wasn't any one way of playing the game and it worked this is a whole load of fun for five or so minutes and that is perfect for an arcade setting fantasy zone is well it's obviously quite a lot like defender it wouldn't exist if not for that game but aside from it being a much cuter experience to the point where it's a defining game for the whole cute map genre it makes a few welcome additions to the formula there's the shop where you can power up your ship the generators that offer you a firmer idea of what you still need to do in a level and a bunch of memorable boss fights for this and perhaps been that little bit easier on the eyes the adventures of the almighty oppa oppa are a bit more palatable these days especially if you're going to play for any decent length of time [Music] basketball just works so well in the arcade doesn't it an understanding or even a liking of the sport isn't in any way required to enjoy this title and because of that nba jam kind of transcended the sport ultra fast two on two action where you throw up bricks do some spectacular dunks listen to the dulcet tones of tim kitsuo and ideally have a friend who's going to love it just as much as you nba jam is a fantastic evolution of midway's previous beeble classic arch rivals and for a certain generation it's always going to be one of the most memorable and best loved arcade games of them all i've never been too big on the shooting gallery games where you've got a big massive machine gun or anything like that the operation wolves and what have you but i do like ones where you've got a regular pistol and you need to react quick so i had a lot of love for the virtua cop games especially virtua cop 2. they're very cool little pieces even if civilians are often so ridiculous in how often they'll leap out of cover just to tell you not to shoot them i mean why would you do that anywho this quick game of gunning down perps before the circle around them goes all red and they shoot you isn't the most famous of sega's shooters nowadays but damn if it wasn't worth sticking a quid into at the time [Music] cave masters of the bullet hell genre of shmuppage make their first appearance with one of their few forays into the horizontal progear is a typically beautiful game by them with lovingly crafted sprites to go along with the very pretty and exceptionally deadly shotguns and well it's also by some distance a hell of a lot less cringey to play than death smiles is i've always leaned more towards the vertical shooters as games i prefer playing but this is a definite gem and one of the best horizontal shmups of them all up next it's commando you know just to continue with the little theme of blasting everything in sight commando had a little misfortune back in the arcade due to snk zakari warriors kind of stealing its thunder but this to me has always been the more fun game a lot of this has to do with the ability to really rip through commando if you're able to moving like grease lightning towards the last bit of the stage trying to get the bonus general and feeling like a proper hero with every well-placed shot iconic home ports for the nests and the micro computers also help but the original arcade definitely gives off that one man army rambo type feeling more secret agent capers are bound in rolling thunder another classic from namco this side-scroller certainly influenced many others with its options for cover power-ups hidden behind doors and its lower and upper levels but there's still plenty of love about what was back then a very original title the oddly proportioned characters with incredibly long legs the masker soldiers you constantly have to shoot and the often quite clever nature of the levels themselves it's always stood out a little bit from so many other side-scrolling shooters as a result and that's not going to change anytime soon well this is by my account the fifth game in a row which involves grabbing a gun and blasting everything in sight i'm not trying to send out some sort of subliminal message or anything but that's just something you do a lot in the arcades isn't it this one puts you back in the shoes of alex murphy for a sequel that's way better than the original but unfortunately never had a home port robocop 2 is still a side scroller but it's one where you have a lot more freedom of movement it's all a lot smoother it's less of an irritating coin muncher and it's also just damn fun to slam guys all over the shop when they're too close to gibb with the auto9 this is one of the very best robocop games and it's quite an underrated little title of course there's nothing all that underrated about double dragon techno says beat him up coming in here at the nice position of number 69 was an absolute game changer the game that popularized and helped to create an entire massive arcade genre the original double dragon in spite of certain things like a lack of variation in enemies and a bunch of technical hiccups that do make it rather slow going at points still has enough for it to be able to hand with other beat em ups that came later especially when it comes to a whole raft of cool weapons and moves including the stupidly overpowered elbow weirdly the arcade never had an utterly worthy sequel to the original double dragon the second was too similar the third was absolute rubbish but good sequels would certainly come out in the home legend of karge is one of those games that kind of gets a mixed reception nowadays but i personally adore taito's game it's a straight tribute to a whole load of classic martial arts movies the arcade is often all about the simplest of pleasures and when you've got a game like this where you do little but outrageously fly about and are able to throw your death stars at enemy ninjas in all directions well that's right up my alley with a whole bunch of nicely done little scenes that always keep the action moving forward it's just the sort of thing i'd want to play for no more than a couple of minutes in other words it's taken a while but crystal castles is the first game on the list where the optimal way to play it is with a trackball something that i always struggle with but despite that there are a few trackball titles on here still as fun as the game is with all of its batting of the ball and struggle to collect the gems before even the enemies do or before they kill you the main thing i love about the adventures of old bentley bear here simply is how it looks to me this is still one of the absolute best looking arcade games there's ever been even if it's nearly 40 years old it's just i don't know something about this heavily geometric style something that's apparently an example of trimetric projection if wikipedia is to be believed did you ever watch mtv2 back in the late 90s or early 2000s it feels like the guys behind that channel's aesthetic played more than their fair share of crystal castles i adore it game's great too [Music] when it all comes down to it a lot of athletic games are basically track and field all over again they're a bit more sophisticated nowadays but in the days when the arcades were more prevalent they were basically all about hammering those buttons or getting that perfect 45 degree angle as much as i do enjoy games like sega's decathlete or indeed namco's international 3d update of this the original recipe is always going to be the main one that sticks out in my mind the 1984 game that i've always loved whether in the arcade or in the home that is in the home unofficially as daley thompson's decathlon for the speccy it's utterly classic fun whether you end up pumping your fists in victory or quizzically rubbing your head at your own failure speaking of influential games and original recipes well it scarcely gets more influential than this space invaders needs absolutely no introduction if this were a list based more upon important survival and pure personal taste obviously would be a great deal higher but i do have a lot of taste for the original space invaders even as it gets closer to a 45th anniversary it still manages to do a lot with very little just a few universally recognized alien sprites a little spaceship to blast them with and that relentless boop of their movement that gets faster and faster the more aliens you shoot down it attracted tons of people towards it for damn good reasons and those reasons are still very much on show in 2021 back to sega scalar world for something a little different from them thunderblade one of the most spectacular of the classic crop of scalers tries to do damn near everything either you're flying top down and gratuitously zooming in and out as you descend and ascend or you're in the more traditional behind the top of you weaving your way through shots flying through caves and doing various other ridiculous things it was always too complex for home versions to get even remotely close to it at the time and the original arcade is still one that stands up the action you would expect from other super scalers is most definitely here but oddly my favorite fill about the thunderblade is the weirdly relaxed fusion jazzy soundtrack that isn't what you would think would soundtrack such a game but is one of my absolute favorite scores of them all there's a good few games i can think of from the days when i dragged my parents to arcades regularly that were always absolute must plays every single week we'll undoubtedly be seeing just about all of them but seeing as i was a big ninja turtles or hero turtles as it was in the uk back then then you can bet that the tmnt arcade was one of them i even managed to beat it sort of what happened was that a bunch of older kids happened to leave the machine right near the end i noticed this and managed to finish the job with what they'd left behind the memory still sticks in my mind kind of anyway this is one of konami's legendary big four player beat-em-up cabinets it's not the last one we're gonna see by any stretch and the presentation just makes it and the presentation makes this just as much as the simple action that it offers more trackball fun and this time it's with the almighty marble madness actually a lot of what i said about crystal castles can apply here too again the look of this game is something that i absolutely adore and what has always driven me towards this game is a definite favorite of mine but there are some other things here mark cerny's game has an odd atmosphere an oddly eerie touch that you don't necessarily find in most arcade games without actually trying to be scary i don't know perhaps it's the music or just the escher-esque construction or a little bit of all of that but this could just be not much more except carefully guiding a marble down a course and yet it ends up being so much more [Music] [Music] well here's our first capcom fighting game and i'm most certainly happy to put an entry from the vampire savior series here or dark stalkers whatever you prefer really obviously the technical qualities of the game hardly need much puffing up it's a fighting game by capcom for heaven's sake but these games have such a great amount of character possibly even more than big old street fighter 2 even they have such a memorable roster everyone from morrigan to john talbine felicity to my own personal favorite cutesy psychotic bounty hunter baby bonnie hurt this could be an entry for any dark stalkers game and in a way it is basically an entry for all of them but vampire savior two for me is just the one that got chosen today [Music] here's time pilot this game from konami's early arcadias is a sprite based and perhaps a little more japanese take on the colossus that is asteroids with the concept of being in a futuristic fighter jet and traveling through time taking part in the 20th century's great air battles everything from mowing down biplanes to taking on contemporary jets and eventually hit in the future you get further points for rescuing hostages which is ostensibly your main mission but for the most part you're getting through the waves of bogeys dodging them and their shots in manners that are often rather daring and always satisfying a classic golden age game ah the cheesiness abounds once again can you face down the rampant ninja problems these days are you a bad enough dude to rescue ronnie will you eventually all go for a burger bad dudes is a simple game the mechanics here may not exactly be the most sophisticated or anything like that but this is what data is do and they do it very damn well plus it all comes with a nice bit of self-reference and a great deal of humor whether it's battering up karnov in the first stage or dodging enemies that have inexplicably decided to set themselves on fire ridiculous yet also brilliant it's actually quite fitting that metal slug immediately follows bad dudes while metal slug is a much more sophisticated game in terms of action and mechanics and well just about everything it also doesn't forget to come with lots of character and more than a little bit of humor the brilliant designs and touches in fact just don't bloody stop with this game there's never a dull moment where you don't have something to do or just something to enjoy looking at and that's why it's one of snk's very best games not to mention one that's clearly influenced a whole load of others an almighty evolution of the venerable side-scrolling shooter [Music] thank you for all that i love games like metal slug or indeed cave bullet hell games that take an old genre and bring everything up a few notches i still have tons of time for the best of the earlier titles and when it comes to vertical shmups that usually means capcom's 1943. it doesn't have all the power-ups or the pretty patterns or the tiny hitboxes but it does have action that's gonna get your face pumping out hulk hogan's style pretty damn quick okay maybe you're not actually gonna do that but it still kind of makes you feel like a dash in world war ii a pilot in any case taking on all these planes and blowing up the big boss ships on the ground the later games in the 19xx series are also damn fine titles but this will always be my favorite of them around the time i started going to arcades final fight was still very much all over the place as you might expect but knights of the round was also not hard to find i guess that's not too shocking really but damn this is a right good and memorable one grab a legendary british hero and hack your way through the sinister sounding likes of soldier mask man birdman and fat man occasionally you even get to go on a horse and stomp them into the ground it's not quite golden axe but still an almighty entry into the world of hack and slash beat em up carnage cave are back and gawange is one of their stranger titles more of a run and gunner not quite commando but similar to i don't know elemental master on mega drive if you've ever played it the theme here is classic japanese ghost imagery it's all about the yokai the onibaba and other such fins while the bonus mechanic allows you to slow down the enemy shots a little when you hold the button and take control of your familiar for all the complexities the big cave headrush is as present here as it is in all of their great shooters for something a little similar but way earlier how about sega ninja known as ninja princess in japan this traditional one and gun or one and flowing star i guess takes your female ninja through various scenes on the quest for squalls and goon murder the feudal vibes are perfectly cool and the enemy numbers are overwhelming his kathleetal ninja can disappear for a second to evade shots something very satisfying indeed to pull off one of sega's best early arcade efforts this also had a great although oddly gender swapped port on the master system a somewhat different yet fantastic game from taito that really should have got a home port dead connection is a great take on the arena shooter in which your hard-nosed pi rolls around all over the shop leaps off stairs takes cover and uses a great deal more environment than you would find in smash tv the whole us film noir setting helps too as it's something you don't normally see a fabulous game that's not just presented well but has very sound mechanics taito would also put this talent for smaller yet very detailed sprites and scenes to even better use a little later on the thing with pan is that i could have picked any of the freaking games here whether it's the classic original or the beautifully inventive mighty pan they'd all work my preference however is for pan free which has a classic heart theme of sorts it doesn't have the buster brothers as such but with so many new abilities and so many different takes on the simple act of busting the load of balloons to gradual nothingness it's great and one of the best single screen arcades ever playing it also takes me right back to an arcade in benidorm where i got hooked on it for the first time [Music] [Music] games like pan free weren't necessarily in every arcade you went to while something like daytona usa well that probably was so long as it's got enough room to fit in this is sega's definitive racer for a good couple of generations those a little younger than the folks who grew up without one and all that they're still great 3d super fast racing and well obviously the soundtrack too with those loud and passionate takanobu mitsuyoshi vocals sega were the kins of the arcade circuit for quite some time daytona carried that tradition to another generation when it was released and like all the best sega races it's just as brilliant today the start of the top 50 takes us back to the golden age and back to the brutality of williams by which i don't necessarily mean difficulty i mean being full-on and in your face sinistar has a classic gameplay loop you fly around desperately mining city bombs stopping enemies from grabbing them and so forth until eventually beware i live announces the arrival of one of gaiman's earliest and greatest boss figures the titular ship if you have enough bombs you deposit them into his face and destroy him if you don't you're screwed no other way to say it sinistar himself with all his speech samples and lat war as he eats you alive is undoubtedly what makes this game legendary although it would still be good even without such a villain capcom didn't have too much trouble making their fighters thoroughly chaotic they did it with street fighter 2 making the game faster in response to various bootleg versions that did the same and marvel vs capcom kind of takes it to another level slamming two big franchises together for some tag team fighting action with lit with amazingly high jumps and happily ridiculous super moves it all works out pretty well even beyond the sheer fun of having strider hero go against wolverine or putting together a team with spider-man and mega man and calling it i don't know all the mans or whatever it all started with the x-men up against the folks from street fighter and it only got wilder from there but there's never a point where marvel vs capcom gets too silly to be utterly playable no matter what it's always one of the most entertaining fighting games out there both to play and just to dumbly gore pat [Music] weirdly gyros is another game that kind of bashes two different fins together playing like a cross between konami's own galaga and tempest with a soundtrack that's um slightly inspired by the old band skye's take on bucks to katu and foog in d minor you go round and round on your way through the solar system busy trying not to get killed with ships artfully descending towards you and a few power-ups at your disposal it's a great mashup sort of game and unoriginal as it may be that soundtrack is bloody blistering one of the arcade's great cult classics windjammers is a game loved by damn near everyone who plays it often imitated especially in recent years but not something that's truly been repeated pick your athlete and then throw a disc back and forth with your opponent trying to beat them to the punch and score some points the action can be pretty wild especially when you're not sure how the disc is going to bounce or if you decide you've got the opportunity to rush forward and take a bit of a risk in order to get the victory considering that each set's only 30 seconds long it's not like you have a whole load of time and then inevitably in your quest to outpower your rival over the net you get bloody caught out by the dreaded slow curling one this slice of one-on-one sporty action just managed to get it all white and for the time it's pretty much unique [Applause] one of the definitive super scalar machines after afterburner 2 in the early 90s was one of the centerpieces of any arcade a big sit-down machine that sent you flying and leaning about all over the shop with every move perhaps not as much as an r360 did but relatively speaking afterburner's a neat budget option removed from the legendary cabinet it's still pretty bloody good having all the trademarks of sega's best scaler titles the iconic music and presentation certainly helps a lot but it's also very exhilarating to fly around taking down enemy warplanes and avoiding shots it's also fun to be brash and constantly twirl around all over the place even if more often than not doing so will get you killed but hey it's not like you're ever going to be able to do this in a real f-14 tomcat so you may as well do it here [Music] total carnage big money big prizes i love it are just a few of the utterly inimitable praises uttered by the host of smash tv the world's most popular and most violent game show where contestants risk life and limb just to win a couple of million dollars and about a billion or so vcrs eugene jarvis's update on his own almighty robotron 2084 adds a glorious sheen of dystopia to go along with a whole load more power-ups and enemies and the end result is more than worthy there's such a great flow to smash tv especially when you're able to smoothly move from power up to power up taking out wave after wave of enemies in the process and switching from rockets to bombs from speed ups to shields all sorts whatever it takes in order to survive and hopefully with the odd extra life or two here and there of course you'll most likely die eventually it doesn't take much to be cornered or to step on a mine or to take a stray bullet but it's always tempting to get another coin out and get right back into the fray 10 seconds [Applause] first there was u.n squadron a pretty neat horizontal shooter from capcom that came with a license in japan carrier aaron released a couple of years later is the game's sequel and as fun as un squadron is this one's just so much better again horizontal shooters aren't always my fin but this is one of the very best of them a classic jet fighter affair where you do ridiculous things like blow a massive gap through buildings just so you can fly through them i'm not sure why it wouldn't just occur to our hero to try and fly around them or anything like that but there's no time to think about such things when you've got an entire enemy army to destroy islam such things like this alongside playlats clearly done by folks at the very top of their game makes this one of my absolute favorite non-bullet hell shooters horizontal or vertical this one really deserved a decent home port and sadly it didn't get one daytona usa was only a few entries ago so you can probably guess that i had a little conundrum in my head on whether to go for that game or sega rally as my favorite of sega's 3d racers in the end sega rally just wins out chiefly because it was always the one i played more of back in the day something about the rally setting really worked with this one from the calls of easy right and lon medium left and all that to all the jumping around and rolling and the tons of great feedback that came with it back in the mid late 90s this was simply a must play whenever i came across it and as wonderful as takanoba mitsuyoshi's contributions to daytona usa are there is perhaps no more iconic moment from the man than his simple quiet at the end of each play through only out one two beats this as far as sega's 3d races go and seeing as that's kind of always been a home game for me this ends up grabbing the top sega 3d spot there's a whole load of football arcade games out there and like a lot of football games in the home a lot of them either haven't really held up to time or they were kind of bland from the very beginning only the strongest ones survive and football champ is for me by some distance the greatest football arcade game ever it's not that it does too much that's outrageously different from the likes of super sidekicks or world cup 86 or anything like that but the play is smooth actually well balanced for an arcade footy title and most importantly it's satisfying chipping the keeper is always bloody great it also has a lot of personality it's always fun to accidentally knock down the number in referee so that you can quickly chug a punch or a v-trigger away of your opponent it's even got the super shot that rarest of occurrences which needs quite a few fins to fall in place in order to be activated but when it happens that's quite awesome indeed as far as i'm concerned still the best footy game the arcade's ever produced and we stick with taito for what's surely one of their most legendary arcade efforts chase hq once again personality goes a hell of a long way here you'd expect most taito games to be very strong when it comes to the usual stuff and you'd be surprised if something like chase hq didn't feature solid controls and all the typical things you'd want from a good driving game but the cool concept of chasing down a criminal's car and bashing it until it stops is one thing and the way it's all presented is another the frustrations of nancy at headquarters the whoosh of the nitro as you scream towards your target and naturally the constant wells of your partner to bear down and push it more as you hit the perp over and over as if he's vince mcmahon gasping at pictures of gary streiden chase hq was fortunate enough to receive brilliant ports on machines that really didn't have much business having such good fins but the arcade is naturally still looking another one where the impact kind of goes without saying the odd thing about pac-man is that i guess for a long time i didn't consider myself a big fan of the game or anything it was something i respected a lot without ever playing too much weirdly getting a call to arcade of the game kind of changed that as did learning more about the game's mechanics from folks like john stoodley someone who is well pretty bloody good at pac-man it kind of goes without saying that if you're in the retro game in space you're going to be around it a lot sort of like yuppies and cocaine i guess i've gradually played it more and more and gradually enjoyed it an awful lot more i'm not even unspeakably awful at the game now if he was odd to say that about something so famous but i'm at a point where pac-man's a bit more than a huge gaming monolith now and it's something i actively bloody enjoy enough to kick off the top 40. that's for sure [Music] sunset riders is another one of the key games that were all over the place when i started going to the arcades usually coming on a huge cabinet filled with massive explosions that demanded attention i suppose that if you're around my age this game can't help being iconic the heart pumping music the lovely characters and all sorts of famous speech samples everything from bury me with my money too okay ma'am we won't hurt him which oddly is said after you've just pumped a couple of hundred or so shots into the poor sword but hey ho that's the nature of arcade games isn't it konami's side scroller remains one of the most spectacular of them all and remains one of the most easily playable and entertaining you never forget this one after playing it even once cave's shooters are just getting bigger and better and mushahim sama otherwise known as bug princess is second only to one other for me which we'll be seeing a bit later how come what makes this one stand out i mean there is the general prettiness after all this is the most recent game on the whole list originally coming out in 2004 and as you might expect the graphical work on this is at some freaking ludicrous level as well as striking a white balance between good old school fantasy a bit of anime and of course the pretty and highly deadly patterns of shots you expect from a cave bullet hell title and of course you get the rush of playing these games they look ridiculously hard although they're actually not really as hard as a lot of old school shooters i could mention and the satisfaction of escaping the waves of bullets without dying or using a bomb is almost unmatched lovely title graphically galaxy force 2 is possibly the most impressive of all the super scalar games even when you think that a lot of them were amongst the best looking fin in the arcades at the time this one just seems to be on a whole other level for all the stuff that's going on the huge and undoubtedly expensive cabinet obviously helped matas there too but much like afterburner this game doesn't need the big cabinet to shine it's a legendary space shooter no matter what helped along by a cracking soundtrack that much like thunderblade opts for more jazz fusion approach that's quite appropriate for the on-screen action still an absolutely wow in technical experience like this one was one of the great reasons to go to the arcade especially for those of us who didn't have much except zx spectrums and c64s in the home and who boy did this game deliver on that front a classic western license tacked onto a japanese game that doesn't really make a huge amount of sense when you think about it although dynamite deco is at the very least set in the big skyscraper die hard arcade as we knew it over here is one of the few games that really managed to capture all the things that made old 2d beat him up so good and transfer them to 3d it's just as fun as damn near any classic of the genre you'd care to mention it's got a good sense of humor about it and there's so much variety in everything from the weapons to the enemies and all the different scenes that it's pretty hard to get bored with all that's going on even the quick time events are still satisfying there was certainly a lot more novel when this game first arrived that's for sure another legend from the golden age this time from bali midway whether you play it in budweiser or root beer form the aim of tapa is the same frantically clear above the patrons descending upon you desperate for you to quench their first it's a game of damn near constant calculation make sure you slide the exact amount of pints down there take note of the groups that are getting the closest judge whether you've got enough time to grab all the glasses see if you can get a bonus tip even if that presents its own risk it feels as though you're doing so much when you're playing tapa but it all progresses quite smoothly even as the hordes get ever more impatient and closer to the bar just inches from grabbing you and chucking you out even if there are so many different ways to screw up it's still great to hang on and even greater if you actually do manage to empty the bar clearing out the ones who constantly come back for multiple drinks before another wave enters brilliantly complex and simple at the same time and a true arcade gem the impact of mortal kombat is obviously something that's been gone through plenty of times this game strode into the arcades and became lee big fin overnight everyone's salivating at the loud action and the sight of blood it has at times become fashionable to dismiss the whole thing as a cheap gimmick that covered a lousy game but nah that's bollocks the original mortal kombat is a classic fighting game that has more than enough depth for anyone to be getting on with alongside its various fatalities and little secrets it was a defining game of my arcadias but it's still one i happily play today it had a satisfying feeling about it beyond the bloodshed that well it wasn't necessarily better than street fighter it was just different and it's something that still very much shines nowadays just as back in the day i love them both and for all the sequels to this one some of which are very damn good indeed the original mortal kombat is still without question my favorite entry in midway series they just keep getting bigger and more important now don't they ed log's seminal game for atari took the classic dungeon crawler and made it an arcade game it's a maze but now it's top down now it's fast oh and there's about 100 or so different monsters pouring out of generators each and every second so you know have fun and all that death is kind of inevitable in gauntlet no matter what you do you can't keep your health topped off forever without using money after all before the arcade trappings it still has the feeling of taking a bit of an adventure and it makes you want to keep going and going to see if this descent into the depths actually does have a finishing point oh and the speech samples obviously it seems that for arcades more than anything else things like that do go a long way it is all about the attraction after all been around about 25 years since point blank first came to my attention and ever since then it doesn't feel like there's been any time when the game doesn't grab everyone's attention it's the perfect mix of shooting gallery goodness and a casual party atmosphere something for everyone to play that's quite a bit different from the more intense light gun titles that were also going about at the time the appeal's just always gonna be there even now whenever i go to any expo or event like that if there's a point-blank machine you can bet that there's going to be a big queue for it from the very start of the show right up to kicking out time on sunday namco had both the more serious and the lighter side of light gun games down utterly pat at this time and this is the one that absolutely everyone loves for bloody good reason right here just before the top 30 comes the first proper street fighter game and it's alpha 3 which has always been my definite go-to of the alpha games naturally having a big old roster and neatly collating all the different ways to play the title in one neat package helps with that as well as the graphical fidelity and all those other nice things but i suppose really that the alpha game anyone would choose more than anything comes down to whichever one was the most easily available to play at the time and for me that was always alpha 3. i mean it is a street fighter game after all it's pretty assuredly going to be bloody excellent it's just that this one has the option of everything from dan to dawson and birdie to olento the simplicities of the golden age in many ways aren't actually simplicities at all they're games that may look very simple indeed but actually have plenty going on under the hood to help with the player's general aim of setting as highest score as possible and sticking their initials on the top tekken's bomb jack at first glance looks like a game where you just jump all over the place and grab the bombs on the screen but when you get into the multipliers the bonuses the knowledge of triggering them all the power-ups or what have you when you see it played well it's like there's a whole bloody science to the art of grabbing these bombs in a perfect sequence but of course the other beautiful side of it all is that you don't need to know about any of that to have a good time and i can safely say that this is one of the most addictive and flat-out greatest games of the entire golden age period was this my first ever sega game proper one that is not just a conversion to the spectrum it's possible that it was it's either this or another game that we're going to see in a little bit the golden axe is certainly a big part of my very first arcade it's all a bit hazy i was pretty bloody young after all but there is a vivid picture perhaps a jumble of memories of the first time my parents took me into an arcade and this game being the first one that captured my attention the first that caused me to tug on my dad's arm and ask him for 10p obviously it wasn't disappointing thirty years later golden axe is a definitive hack and slash beat him up and a game i know inside and out one that i've played to death both here in the arcade and on its excellent mega drive conversion it's probably not a game i have to justify the placing of we've seen a good few beat em ups we've explained their appeal and golden axe excels in every department but the memories here are also a big part of what makes this utterly important to me [Music] every time we've pulled from the williams world we've talked about how these games tend to just beat you about the head with the loudest colors and sounds possible the best way to attract customers in their wise was clearly for an appealing form of physical assault robotron 2084 is perhaps the best example of this while also being one of their best games beyond all the intoxicating [ __ ] that's happening this is eugene jarvis after all and it's his original arena shoe that would inspire so much that it came after by himself and also by other people the one where you save the last human family that is if you get to them through the waves of bad guys who are going to kill you in seconds flat if you don't control them it has a certain vibe that a few golden age games have a touch of darkness a wonder at wiley's folks are the last human family but putting the wank hat on and contemplating whether robotron was a game made by folks who didn't think the human race had too many days left whatever reason doesn't affect the core of the game and how it is so so freaking good and well here's something different again it's the super scalers and alongside another game we'll be seeing soon enough this is probably the most important and best known sega scaler of them all the one where you get in a furry and you just go ahead and drive modula is a time limit and you probably want to go pretty bloody quickly if you fancy reaching the end of the course the romanticism of out one and you suzuki's claims of wanting to create a game that was about driving and not racing are perhaps not so apparent when you're bobbing and weaving through traffic at top speed while trying desperately not to smash into roadside buildings but the beauty of the game is most certainly always there a whole lot of love a whole lot of good music and perhaps a little sense of letting the wind blow back your hair with the love of your life by your side you probably shouldn't drive so fast in real life mind you as you will very probably be arrested [Music] once again we go from light bright and vibrant to a game that is well basically a bloody void i'm not sure if there's any more sudden graphical shift in this top 100 then the one that takes us from out one to asteroids one of the vector kins of the golden age and a game that's just well lines lines and lines and lines usually form in the shape of rocks you need to break apart it's that simple in fact asteroids is exactly like real life you wheel around confused and end up doing little except break rocks until you inevitably die screw the aspirational nature without one this is reality okay i'm clearly talking absolute bollocks here this is just a simple game of survival after all but all these years later it's still one of the best still one where careful flying and just scraping past these lethal space boulders is exciting and stimulating and clearing a wave makes you damn happy for a couple of seconds until the next one comes along and then it's back to it the grindstone never felt so good strider will never not be a game near and dear to me i've talked about it endlessly in the past and will happily do so again this hacking side scroller has to take some sort of price for endless scenes and set pieces boss fight after boss fight the anti-grav section jumping from chopper to chopper the one where you race down an exploding slope and make that big jump it just doesn't stop for me that's kind of a lot of things i enjoy about a good arcade game or just a good game in general if someone asks me what my preferred sort of game was i could easily just point to this one right here soul calibur is more famous today but weirdly something about the original has always made it my favorite i could talk about the dirtier mid 90s vintage aesthetic and all that but that's not really it it's more to do with holidays in clacton where i probably spent at least half of my time in the arcade on the caravan site playing solid it's not like there was a whole or else do to be honest i wouldn't argue with anyone who said that the sequels are better and more complete games but this is the one that i played endlessly if the arcade had the edge of soul from the ps1 version it'd be even higher final fight gets a nod over strider in this list whereas it didn't once before all its greatness strider is more comfy in the home the mega drive specifically final fight yeah this is an arcade game plenty of ports of course but they rarely nailed it final fight was still absolutely everywhere when i first started going to arcades almost as ubiquitous as the newer fighting game capcom had released in fact he couldn't do a run through the seafond's arcade without playing it at least once and having tons of fun it was the biggest leap forward in beat him up since double dragon it inspired so many others going forward and wrote a blueprint for capcom that had last nearly a decade not bad achievements when you think about it a similarly ubiquitous title this one an arcade just didn't feel complete if it didn't have joe musashi's eyes peering emotionlessly at you from this game's attract mode but this was for me the arcade game at the end of the street it was in a little video rental store and i soon got hooked wanting my dad to take me down there every night just to play shinobi i can't remember actually renting any videos from there i have to say it did kind of close down after a short while this was i am pretty sure my first arcade game it's still one of the very best today every bit as good as it was the first time and a definitive side scroller but there might not even be a top 100 without it the venerable side scrollers of old like shinobi did soon get a glow up of course we've seen that with metal slug and elevator action returns for me is another prime example you take a famous old arcade that's kind of dull in all honesty use a similar miniature graphic style to dead connection that we saw previously and this masterpiece as a result overused word sure but returns is very hard to find any sort of fault in and filled with wonderful ideas sometimes it's very much worth taking something that's a little past itself by date and giving it a new lease of life top 20 time and i hope you've got your buzzard handy the very best of williams arcade games isn't quite as full-on as the likes of defender robotron or even sinistar but joust is damn near unique it's so bloody simple all you need is careful button pressing so that you can get the higher ground and knock your opponent's block off collecting their eggs along the way as a concept and game it's genius and possibly the most addictive game in the entire list i have spent hours playing joust not even recognizing the time that's flying by because it's such a pure gameplay experience that you constantly want more of considering that arcade enjoyment's usually measured in minutes that's not bad is it much like the last game bubble bobble is another work of simple and uncomplicated brilliance where everything you do is highly satisfying you trap enemies in bubbles and then hopefully you burst them all at once leaving a whole bunch of fruit and various other trinkets as your reward while one of gaming's greatest earworm soundtracks plays constantly in the background it's a game that works anywhere gradually gets more complicated as it goes on and it's a game that well kinda just knows how good it is really it's deemed to be a game that sticks with you no matter where you play it for the first time and no matter when you play it i've been occasionally hitting up bubble bubble for the last 30 years and it still feels as fresh and as glorious as the very first time i have a strong memory of the first time i came across time crisis in the arcade this huge screen cabinet with a single gun not something i'd never seen before but then you also had the addition of a foot pedal there wasn't all that much like it and it was a curious thing playing it for the first time and realizing that you use the foot pedal for taking cover that's a game changer whereas most shooting galleries do end up feeling like shooting galleries no matter how they're dressed up this one felt like a proper shootout from an action movie while also having all the necessary building blocks of a light gun game the regular goons will usually miss you the red ones you've got to take out sharpish the various environmental hazards bonus opportunities and of course the race against the clock it was a brilliant must play game then and it most certainly still is now thanks to getting satellite rather early on i was familiar with the simpsons before coming across the arcade for the first time so as you can imagine i couldn't get to the machine fast enough when i first saw it in fact i don't think i ever took a single trip to the arcade back in the early 90s where i didn't play the simpsons game i'm pretty sure i still remember exactly where it was right near the windows in the sunspot amusements it's a konami beat-em-up where the controls are simple even when compared to something like final fight but the presentation and character means none of that really matters you're too busy picking out all the great characters especially in a game that came out when the show itself was still in its infancy it's not quite konami's top game on this list but it's not far off due to the huge impact it had on me and it's criminal that it barely made it into people's homes mind you the rather late and obscure c64 part of the game is far better than it had any right to be [Music] house of the dead 2 just and i really do mean just beats out time crisis to be the list's top light gun game it was a close call house of the dead 2 may not have some of the more advanced mechanics that time crisis possesses but this game was even more addicting it's odd the first one didn't make all that much of an impression on me but everything was just bigger and better in the second and it absolutely stuck we took a holiday to the sunny resort of calpe in spain house of the dead 2 was in the local arcade and i just fell in love with it i must have spent half of the holiday playing the damn thing who cares about the beach when there's zombies to shoot and cheesy plots to enjoy holidays are bored that may be tricky to come by these days but i would happily take a fortnight's quality and if house of the dead 2 was readily available the top 15 starts with a game that is desperately underrated it never feels like anyone talks nearly enough about flicky and it's one of my favorite arcades of all time once again it's nothing all that complex you play as a big bird you grab chicks who follow you in a big line and take them to the exit while avoiding cats and other do wells and also throwing the occasional object at them it is a bit odd in how skiddy the whole thing is with flicky jumping around in a way that's quite tricky to get used to at first but once you do it feels so nice and it's great to bounce around with flicky to do stuff with style and to perform perfectly timed jumps that not only send flicky over the enemy but the whole line of chicks following you too because lord knows it's easy to screw up to have the cat take out part of your line and for the whole carefully planned route you've got going for a stage to go utterly bloody one this little bird is probably more famous for his cameos in sonic games these days alas but his own game is absolutely blinding [Music] do it feels like it's been a while since we've seen a data east game but here is their most famous game of them all and indeed their best aside from having the only infectious arcadia worm that can seriously compete with bubble bobble burger time is a glorious affair of carefully manipulating the various evil non-burger related items who want peter pepper's blood hopefully crushing them under a bit of burger that you've stomped on and sent fall into the next level and using whatever tools you have at your disposal to help you construct a good burger albeit one that has lots of tiny little footsteps over it it's got the monae collection you'd expect from a good golden age single screen title it's got tons of charm too and hey it is food so naturally i'm gonna have a bit of bias towards it it's a bloody good burger [Music] i've already stated my love for tekken and this one here is absolutely my tekken of choice for me it's still the peak of the series of course the only real reason for this is because it's the tekken i played the most the series has always been good and the most recent one tekken 7 is a fantastic game indeed but you always go back to your one don't you it helps also that tekken 3 is the one that introduced a lot of crucial mechanics that play a big part in the series going forward the side steps and what have you whether it was in the arcade or on the ps1 there just wasn't anything that could touch tekken 3 certainly not when it came to 3d fighting titles and the whole community aspect of the fighting really helped its cause as well the race to unlock all the various characters the ever familiar crowds hanging around all the machines it really is everything a fighting game should be as far as i'm concerned some people tend to treat alien syndrome like a bit of an also ran an arcade game from sega that's not necessarily as technically impressive as their most typical smashers but there's something different about this something that makes it stand out tension isn't something you often experience with arcades something a bit different from the usual rush of adrenaline you tend to get from them battalion syndrome with its suave muted colours eerie atmosphere and pumping heartbeat music is kind of designed to make you be a little on edge even in an arcade setting the ever-present timer and blood-curdling scream when the aliens catch up with you certainly doesn't calm anything down either all of this is wrapped up in a simple top-down shooter that wants you to be urgent but will throw tons of aliens at you to keep you constantly reacting and ever more on edge it's not all that far removed from something as old school as a berserk or a game along those lines but the whole package itself it's one of the best and every time i play it it seems to leave even more of a mark go to the exit just outside the top 10 we have the golden game lap for many is the best to never make it out of the arcade the almighty golden axe had a bunch of sequels mostly in the home that were kind of variable in quality but this one in the arcade was a total home one with one very hefty exception for many arcade players it is the perfect sequel the revenge of death adder takes the original and improves absolutely everything not just the obvious things like exceptional graphics and bigger effects and all a lot but gameplay that's been entirely reworked is much greater in depth especially if you've got more than one person playing and hundreds of different little touches to give the game as much impact as possible as excellent as the original golden axis the revenge of death adder knocks it into a cocked hat and even if it never had the increased exposure of a home version the sheer quality of the game has taken it to a state now where it is considered amongst the best arcades of them all good enough for revivals re-releases and endless gushing i can do little except add my own appreciation to the gush which is a next level title that is rather unfortunate not to make the top 10. that said the top 10 is pretty bloody good we just talked a little about tension and a darker sort of arcade game with alien syndrome but the darkest arcade game of them all has never been in question it has always been and always will be missile command nothing else comes close the game where from the beginning you're essentially dead and so is everyone else you're in the last line of defense desperately fighting off nukes and protecting these cities from annihilation for as long as you can but kill screen aside there's never a point where they're going to stop coming if you lose and you haven't set a high score the gigantic explosion and the words the end as opposed to game over leave little doubt as to what's happened the end of civilization it's the perfect cold war game and the aura of what dave phil was busily crunching away at creating was enough to give him severe night terrors for a long time afterwards constant dreams of seeing missiles black out the skies over san luis obispo if you play this game for long enough you might end up the same way a priceless artifact not just of the golden age of arcade gaming but of an entire precarious period of human history it deserves to be considered one of the most important games ever released it's time to hunt we've already seen a few great capcom beat-em-ups but there's two for me that stand out over everyone else and even beyond the sheer joy of being able to play as the predator and lay waste of thousands of aliens in the most glorious of crossovers alien vs predator is a beautifully made example of the genre the predators have so many great moves at their disposal dashes uppercuts discs from hell all sorts of brutality with their claws and naginata and obviously the signature shoulder cannon especially good when you get hold of the super magazine and get to go absolutely postal for a few seconds avp does away with a bunch of the old trappings of beat-em-ups special moves costing you a bit of energy and so on and gives you a lot more freedom to do any move at any time with the counterbalance being that you have to face so many more enemies and the end result just feels so much better i'm sure all of what i've said applies to play in the game as dutch or kuasara too but all of this excellent beat em up construction plus you get to play as the predator this is one of the absolute best in the entire field [Music] well here's street fighter 2. mongi we are going to be seeing street fighter 2 twice there's far too much to say about it to just fit into one entry quite frankly super street fighter 2 turbo is of course the ideal closing point for the title or at least it was for many years all the graphical upgrades all the new challenges plus the addition of supremely fast speed that capcom were persuaded to stick in thanks to the various bootlegs of the original sf2 it's still one of the premier fighting games on the circuit to this very day but that's not just simply to do with the huge success and popularity of the game is because very little has managed to come along that could conceivably better it even at the time when this came out and people were starting to get a bit of public fatigue about all the many different versions of street fighter 2 that capcom were put in out there you just had to stand in awe of this one no matter what it was that you loved about street fighter 2 this one catered for it all as well as being the first of the games to feature the almighty super combos the first to feature akuma the first to have air combos and so many other things that would continue to define the series after it finally moved past the second installment not only is it still important to this day it's hard to conceive of a time when the game isn't going to remain an active concern in the fighting game world [Music] and here's my favorite capcom beat-em-up cadillacs and dinosaurs may not be quite as deep a beat-em-up as alien vs predator and it may not give you the option of playing as the predator but this game for me was a case of love at first sight it still represents capcom at the very height of their powers you do still get a load of moves and you also get an absolute cackload of weaponry to use against the various goons not to mention the little sequences when dinos can join in the fray either for or against you but this was a right special one to me and an old friend we didn't know anything about the original cadillacs and dinosaurs license and frankly i still don't but this is one of the very few arcade games that i managed to beat legitimately with his help and with a whole load of 20ps it got to the point where i would go to the arcades just to play cadillacs and dinosaurs memories like that are a bit special and form a big part of why this is my favorite capcom beat-em-up but even if it wasn't for that i think it would still be up there as one of the very best games in a genre the studio had absolutely mastered it's too fantastic not to be really that first experience with a bullet hell game sure is something else i'd certainly recommend if you haven't done it if you thought that these games with the massive loads of shots going about everywhere are clearly far too hard to be casually played or anything like that it's most certainly worth it anyway dude and patchy is where my first experience came from probably where quite a few people's experience came from seeing as it's one of cave's first and most famous shmups and the thing about these games is that they give you adrenaline like no other it seems like the amount of bullets on screen are insurmountable until you realize that only a couple of pixels on your ship are going to be affected by them and from there you gradually get through the waves of bullets more and more and it just feels fantastic if you play it on arcade it puts you up on your tiptoes if you put it on mame it'll make sure you're standing up soon enough the ability to string ludicrous hit strings and combos helps too and makes the whole thing truly next level and before you know it you want to have a look at damn near every bullet hell that's around i've played a good few in my time it has to be set but as the first of them and a game i've played a ton since dude and patchy will always be the best of the lot for me the top five starts with um something outrageous how can this even be not only is this a sports game in the top five but it's a golf game in the top five golf freaking golf some of you might be going absolutely spare at such an ocean but nazca's neo turf masters transcends a sport that normally features little except middle aged men pottering about freshly cut grass in their plus fours in neo turf masters golf is recast as the breeziest most exciting and most welcoming fin in the world and all it needs is a simple power bar system one of gaming's catchier soundtracks a whole load of iconic sound samples and some of the prettiest 2d graphics you're likely to find to be honest there is something intangible about it all you can look at other games the guys who made this created the earlier likes of major title and see a pretty good golf game for the arcades but it's a big jump to this one of the loveliest and most beaming of arcade games playing neo turf masters is just gonna put a big smile on your face it's as simple as that and it doesn't matter what you think of golf is gonna do it anyway one of the best sports games ever [Music] [Music] [Applause] in at number four we have the champion of the golden age the kin of the old school arcade games this time around at least it's galaga on another day in a different mood perhaps it could have been missile command or joust or whatever occupying such lofty heights but galaga in the end ends up this high it just gets better and better over time once again a quarter arcade is too thankful of this the game sure does shine in a slightly more miniature form but when you're giving such fins a proper road test and galaga's already one of your big favorites you just really start thinking more and more about why the game is special to you and why it works so damn well i suppose you could think about silly fins like the pretty patterns in all the bullet hell games i've talked about then look at this game and see that it's kind of the originator for such fins you could think about the general simplicity of golden age arcade tiles that's mixed with a hidden depth and see that galaga is a shining example of that you could think about how it does so much with a simple bit of space a few ships some iconic sound effects and some more subtle wubs and dubs in the distance it's all air and i think it's the most fitting choice for a single game that could represent the arcade's golden age that's as high as the praise can get really and galaga deserves the whole lot of it another burning question before we get to the inevitable top two which you're probably wondering what the order of is gonna be by now what's the top sega game and well of course it's space harrier if you know me and my work there probably wasn't a great deal of suspense there it's always been my favorite sega arcade by a considerable distance there's the scalar side fins of course which is a big part of why it's such a wonder not just because of the technical aspects but due to the wonderful things they did with it creating a fantasy zone filled with big creatures dragons and various other obstacles rather than the more typical space sitting or open world all of this makes it a wonderfully inventive take on the shoot-em-up of course all the action you'd expect from something top-down or horizontal but in a totally different viewpoint then there's the music which to me is still my favorite of all the brilliant full-song soundtracks that the sst and hero karaguchi put together being such a triumphant little piece stick it all into a wonderful machine and at least still being one of the big attractions in the times when i first started going to the arcades it's a very very special game for me and it's an easy choice for me to make as the best fin sega ever put in the arcades well you might have expected this street fighter 2 is at number two because why not have a little bit of a surprise i mean i certainly wouldn't argue with anyone who'd put it as number one or who thinks that it should be number one or who thinks that i'm absolutely stark waving bonkers to not put it at number one this is pretty much an entry for both world warrior and champion edition as they were both very much in the arcades by the time i got to them and for all the other wondrous games that were in those arcades at the time street fighter 2 was the absolute kin it was in every single arcade and there was usually a queue the one game that everyone was talking about and everyone wanted to have a go at whether it was against the computer or against each other whether they were friends or complete strangers a lot of people no doubt have similar experiences because it was a game that did kind of change everything there'd been plenty of one-on-one fighting games before street fighter 2 including luava middling original game it spawned from but none of them were even remotely close to the point where they may as well have been an entirely different genre its impact on me and people of my generation can still be seen all over the shop both in gaming and outside of it and to call it the best arcade cabinet ever would hardly be incorrect even for all of its importance playing the game in all of its various incarnations is still special still something that comes as second nature still a big part of my game in history it's well it's street fighter 2 and in many ways that's enough said [Music] that does admittedly rely a lot on great memories and big sentimentality it would feel one to put anything other than wwf wrestle fest at number one even if it can't hope to compare to the roanoke's historical importance this really wasn't in any doubt at all in the end the choice really came down to this with the limited space that i have if i had the choice of just one arcade cabinet that i could put in my home an original one which would it be and the answer would always be without hesitation wwf wesselfest it is after all something that rather neatly combined all the things i was massively into at that time going to the arcade playing video games and wrestling the perfect game at the perfect time of course it is an absolute banner of a video game techno's title is a hefty improvement over previous efforts like matt mania and wwf superstars complete with a bunch of the day's biggest grapplers and a whistle that rolls right off the tongue hogan warrior million dollar man jake the snake big boss man mr perfect earthquake sergeant slaughter demolition and the legion of doom they're all represented so well complete with their signature moves so wonderfully crafted in 2d to a level that pretty much no modern wwe game could ever dream of getting near the crunch of the ddt the posing of the big leg drop the earthquake splash stroke giant whoopsie the oh my god he's dead of the lod's doomsday device you've got the two different ways to play the speedy royal rumble for those who want a quick blast and the main tag mode for anyone who wants to settle in for the long haul and reach a final battle with the dominant and unplayable legion of doom and of course you've got all sorts of little details the cutaways to mean jean interview in the lod the one match that's in a cage the snacking on danger and dining on death more than any other game every single little tidbit of this is written in my heart so yeah it's a magnificent game and even without all the sentimentality it would still very easily make the top five but all the memories attached to this game can't be ignored i've played it every single place i've managed to find it as a child and as an adult for 30 years and every time it is still the most satisfying experience the sentimentality that often comes with a long time wrestling fan also only gets stronger as the years go by especially when one considers that of the original 12 guys who made up wesselfest's roster only five are alive today warrior bossman perfect earthquake crush of demolition and both animal and hawk are now all gone that's the slightly sad side of it all but wesselfest immortalizes them all in many ways they're always gonna be as lively as hell right here it's the perfect representation of my time going to the arcades my time being a wrestling fan and well my time finding the great things that i love to this very day really there could be no other choice for me as the number one game and with that hopefully you've enjoyed this big old top 100 and you're going to go off and play some classic arcade games for yourself whether it's a typical call-up a long-awaited revisit or for the very first time whether it's on an actual machine or on maim it doesn't matter really they're special things no matter what bye for now two three [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Kim Justice

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Keywords: kim justice, top 100 arcade, top 100 arcade games, top 100 games, best arcade games, golden age arcade games, 1990s arcade games, 1980s arcade games, 2000s arcade games, sega arcade, capcom arcade, konami arcade, atari arcade, namco arcade, taito arcade, classic arcade games, kim justice top 100, kim justice retro, kim justice list, kim justice arcade, kim justice games, kim justice video, street fighter ii, pac-man, space invaders, mortal kombat, space harrier, tekken

Id: xlKha2OmS8M

Length: 109min 48sec (6588 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021