The following is an unranked list of 93 games which I consider my favorites. Games that are ranked in my Top 20 are noted with a star ⭐
My five star rating system here is within the context of my favorite games - so a one or two star rating doesn't mean it's a bad game, it's just at the low end of my favorites. Each game has a mini-review that can be expanded, which has a link to the Wikipedia page for the game.
The default sorting is by release year. There is a custom sort available below. You can also view games for a specific platform.
+ custom sort
Sort by:
Sort order:
Expand all mini-reviews
Fish Tales is a 1990s-era pinball machine that is has been faithfully recreated in an emulator called Pinball Arcade, available on Steam. The shooter is on a fishing trip during which he can catch fish, lie about how big they were, win different classes of championships (multiball), and trigger a wide variety of special events like feeding frenzy, rock the boat, and monster-fish. Fish-tales has the most satisfying, most symmetric, alternating-ramp-shots of any pin I've ever played. It also has a hilarious "video mode" played on the game's backboard display, in which you torpedo waterskiers and other watersporters who are disrupting the tranquility of your fishing expedition. Fish Tales has highly addictive gameplay, and a great soundtrack to go with it.
I became a bit of a pinball junkie during my college years, and I've played all variety of pins from the oldest electro-mechanical to the newest solid-state. I consider Fish Tales to be the best pinball machine ever created, and I really have to give a five star endorsement to Pinball Arcade for an amazing video-game reproduction of the machine. The emulation of the game's physics is basically flawless. It has all the quirky bounces of the physical machine that I remember, right down to the ball-lock, the captive ball, and the quirky spins and infuriating bounces around the drains. Fish Tales was a challenging pin, and they really captured its essence.
Hook is a 1990s-era pinball machine that is themed after the movie by the same name, a take on the Peter Pan story. It had an extremely satisfying spiraling ramp shot and jackpot mechanic. This is a machine that is so well done mechanically that the theme is completely irrelevant to me. I'm not even a fan of the movie or the story, in particular. The lighting, music, and sound effects were exceptional and perfectly integrated into the action on this pin.
I really wish that Data East (the maker of this pin, and other greats like Star Wars) would license their machines for the Pinball Arcade PC software. As it may be the only way I'll ever get to play Hook again. I haven't see one of these machines in 10+ years. Stern, Gottlieb, and Williams are all onboard with getting their tables re-made in the digital realm. There's really no downside. It's not like Data East is ever going to make money off of their Hook machines again any other way.
Total Carnage is a one or two player, dual-joystick, multi-directional shooter and bullet hell. It has a slightly inclined overhead view and scrolls both sideways and vertically. In addition to the two joysticks there is also a button for placing bombs. The game is a first cousin of Smash TV sharing controls, play style, and some weapons. Total Carnage's plot centers around a Middle Eastern tyrant named General Akhboob who is making chemical weapons at his "Baby Milk Factory" -- a reference to current events in the Gulf War at the time. The players, Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem, must defeat Akhboob's mutants and capture and kill him.
This is one of the few games that I've finished, multiple times, in the stand-up arcade cabinet. Smash TV makes my "memorable" list, but not my favorites. Total Carnage takes the fun and addictive mechanics of Smash TV and adds a funny and entertaining campaign, and that's what makes it one of my favorite games. It was also a serious quarter-eater, with not only the campaign to finish but a sufficient number of keys to be collected along the way so that you can enter the "Pleasure Domes" after defeating Akhboob.
Also known under its full name "Ivan Ironman Stewart's Super Off Road," later shortened to just "Super Off Road" was an arcade game identifiable by its signature standing cabinet with three steering wheels at arm level and three gas pedals at foot level. You and up to two other racers controlled trucks racing around indoor off-road tracks, from an overhead view. As long as you beat the silver truck (Ironman) you proceeded to the next level. Between levels players could spend their prize purses on upgrading their truck, with transmission, tires, engine, and nitro boosts. The console had a button next to each steering wheel that spent one nitro boost each time it was pressed, rocketing your truck forward. Nitros and money drops would appear randomly on the track and you could pick them up by running over them.
I really liked how the upgrades you purchased carried over from race to race, as it gave an extra feeling of progress rather than just progressing to the next track. The game was still designed to eat quarters, though, with the Ironman truck getting some serious rubber-band boost to catch up to you. The tracks were well designed and fun, and had 3D aspects (jumps, hills, criss-crosses) that worked well with the overhead view. Using nitro at just the right moment, you could get some serious air and rocket past opponents at the last second to win. I never owned any of the console versions of this game, as I considered the cabinet's experience too integral to the game's fun.
You and a friend take on the roles of Hitman and Max Force, agents of Project NARC, to take the war on drugs to the next level. Armed with sub-machineguns and rocket launchers you blast your way through an urban wasteland, dispatching junkies and drug dealers with extreme prejudice. You drive a fully-armed Porche 9-11 (cherry red, complete with "Say No Or Die" license plate) through crowds of pimps, pcp addicts, and even insane killer clowns. Finally arriving at K.R.A.K. headquarters, you face off against the ultimate drug-kingpin supervillain, Mr. Big. This game was not only fun, but it could actually be beaten on a couple buck's worth of quarters. My friend Matt and I would make trips to the mall arcade just to make sure we still had the high score. Sadly, NARC is an endangered video game. The last re-release in 2004's Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for the PS2 and XBox suffered from forward-compatibility issues, and most emulators you find on the Internet are badly broken.
NARC was way ahead of its time, on multiple fronts. It was the first standup arcade game to run on a 32 bit processor and feature 640x480 color graphics. Known as "medium resolution raster," it was the HD of video in the late 80s. The game also pushed the envelope in on-screen violence, earning it a ban in Australia. When you blasted dope dealers with your rocket launcher, they exploded into bloody chunks or flaming heaps of bone and ash. The game's motto was "Nobody Had The Guts, Until Now." I believe the designers probably crafted that motto with a double meaning: referring not just to the NARC agents fighting the drug war with unconstitutional force, but to the game itself being the first to offer gibbing.
Operation Thunderbolt was an arcade shooter that had two optical, uzi-style gun controllers mounted side-by-side on the game cabinet, aimed at the screen. The guns vibrated when fired to simulate recoil. It allowed two player simultaneous play, with each player being susceptible to projectiles on their side of the monitor. The game had side scrolling levels, and forward scrolling, fake-3D levels. Enemies that appeared had to be shot before they fired on you, but you could also shoot down their larger projectiles. Items like ammunition could also be "collected" by shooting them. The guns had a thumb switch for firing a screen-clearing rocket launcher as well. The final mission was to enter a hijacked airliner and kill the hijackers allowing your escape.
Operation Thunderbolt is one of just a few standup arcade games that I finished on the actual arcade machine. I was on a family trip, stuck at a conference on a college campus, but found a restaurant nearby with a game room. It took me a few days of daily play, and two or three rolls of quarters, to finally finish the game without killing hostages or the airline pilot at the end. This game was the successor to Operation Wolf, which I enjoyed but was much more difficult and quarter-hungry than Thunderbolt. It was also the last optical-gun game that I'd ever really "get into."