Ooh, good one. Yep, that’s a difficult game. I was lucky to get to the woo-oo ghosts and the first key.
I got into Galaga in the 90s and was able to master it. There’s no ending to the game so the goal is to score the max withOUT letting it roll over when it gets higher than 999990.
Operation WOLF was also eyepoppingly amazing at the time but really hard and not locally available.
Have you ever seen the hybrid pinball/Pac Man game? Baby Pac Man:
That was one odd game. Our local Venture department store used to have it for a short spell. The main games in the arcade area that I remember were Spy Hunter, Pole Position, Karate Champ, Punch Out, and Dragon’s Lair. Oh, there probably was a Ms. Pac Man, as well. The Venture arcade also brought out the low-level criminal in me. Some kid taught me that I could approach older ladies and ask them for a quarter to call my parents. (I would have been about ten at the time.) I believe I did this once or twice before my conscience got a hold of me.
I could have bought a car with the money I’d sunk into Gauntlet. “Dad needs food… badly,” is often said around here, to blank stares from my sons.
I’d also sunk a fair number of quarters into Spy Hunter.
One of the reasons I dream of great wealth is being able to afford an in-house video arcade.
Well, if you want to relive any of them, there’s always MAME.
I haven’t done anything with that in perhaps decades, but the dream involved actual arcade cabinets.
Sorry, I only provide links, not carpentry services.
Wasn’t there an oversized Superman pinball machine that came out to promote the movie?
My local video store had a Time Pilot, I got real good at that one. In college the student union had a Street Fighter 2 and a Pole Position that got a lot of play.
Space Harrier was mentioned above but wanted to give it another shout out. It and X-Men were my favorite. The hydraulics, colorful graphics, and forced perspective
were mind blowing to me as a kid at the local arcade.
All Atari pinball machines were widebodies (and stupid heavy to move); except for Hercules which was actually oversized. The Superman pinball machine came out four months after the first Christopher Reeve film but the artwork was based on the comic book (none of the characters resembled the actors in the 1978 film).
I helped a friend work on that machine and it spent a little time in my home. The goal is to spell SUPERMAN and to earn extra balls by knocking down sets of drop targets. A fun game, but like a lot of widebodies, the playfield is too sparsely populated with targets, slings, and bumpers for it’s size, so it seems kinda slow compared to a standard sized pin.
The one I am talking about had larger balls and large paddles.
Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Frogger. Yes, I’m old.
I liked very linear games where you basically just had a joystick to control motion and maybe one button to jump or shoot or whatever. That’s it.
The games my son plays where there are like 18 things to push or prod in whatever that device is he holds in his hands make my wiring overload. On the rare occasions I played him in something, my character or car would be running against a wall, with me shouting, “Jesus Christ! What goddam button do I push?!”
I’ve had MAME for a long time, but have become very frustrated with it because it used to, you know, actually work. Then they “improved” it, thereby rendering most of my ROMs unplayable.
WTF could they improve? It’s an emulator - it either works or it doesn’t. When you have a game from 1983 running properly how can you improve it? While making changes to MAME’s user interface and perhaps updating how it interacts with Windows or whatever, why make perfectly useable ROMs into the software equivalent of bricks? It’s the opposite of progress.
MAME was the only way I was ever able to win the optional dragon boss fight in the D&D arcade game. That boss was designed specifically to be a quarter-devourer.
No such thing as far as I (and the Pinside Pinball Machine Database) know of. Surprisingly, the 1979 Atari is the only pinball machine with a Superman theme. It is a widebody but it has normal flippers and balls,
I loved Qix. You had to carve the screen up in rectangles, hard to explain.
QBert or (second) Crystal Castles.
In the early 80s, a buddy had a handheld QBert that was actually pretty good. This was well before anything else handheld; I almost think I imagined it, but no.
The two I probably dropped the most quarters into were Champion Wrestler and WWF Wrestlefest.
Both wrestling games. Both loads of fun to play. Especially with a friend.
Back in the days when Pizza Hut was primarily a sit-down restaurant, the one near where I lived had Wrestlefest in the game room. I always got a kick out of playing as a tag team of Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter, who had turned face by then but was treated as a heel by the crowd in the game.