Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game (1989)
This action-packed side scroller was a dream come true for a young boy who was really into his Saturday morning cartoons. It was a chance to actually control your favorite turtle (Leo for me), fight the Foot and recognizable villains, AND do it w/ your two brothers and Dad... We always made dad be Donatello b/c he wasn't our favorite. Years later I find out via the xbox 360 that Donatello is actually the best character to use b/c of the extended reach of his boa-staff.
Best moment in the game: TMNT was a pure button masher and outrageously cheap in favor of the computer AI. When it wanted you to take damage..you took it. No amount of skill could help you avoid things like the Bebop charge. But frequently when you'd be mashing furiously at a common foot ninja your character would use his weapon to flip the enemy over his head. This random maneuver (though random) was so unbelievably rewarding that they included it as a core ability in follow up TMNT games for the NES.
Fun Fact: In Europe the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were actually called the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. It had something to do with the word ninja sounding too violent. What a bunch of sissies.
Captain America and the Avengers (1991)
This game was very similar to the TMNT game in that it was a side scrolling masher with more than a few cheap mechanics to ensure that you couldn't beat it on one or two quarters. But it had a few important elements. First of all, the characters moved a lot faster giving you real strategical reasons to change positions on the screen. Second, each character could make use of melee AND ranged combat. This was probably the most rewarding aspect of the game. Most of all, however, is that you could actually get better at this game the more you played it. Knowing the character you picked (Iron Man for me) and the way he performed was your ticket to losing less money to this machine.
Best moment in the game: The part I loved most about this game was the voice acting. It pales in comparison to what we have now with celebrities and actors voicing the characters, but back then it was so FRIGGIN AWESOME to hear Captain America yell "The Avengers assemble!" and "I can't move!!!!" (when you died). Even the sinister laugh of Red Skull was mesmerising.
Fun Fact: Data East, the company that published The Avengers made many you-never-played-them games but did manage to create the arcade prototype to a wildly popular computer game called Lemmings.
X-MEN (the arcade game) (1992)
Ok ok...another side scroller. Lame right? Well you'll see what happens here with number 4. This game was developed by the same company that made the TMNT game, so there were many similarities, but also several improvements. They took out some of the super cheap AI which never seemed like a fair way to balance difficulty and just jam packed the game with hundreds of enemies. It made that game absolutely stunning. It would get so crowded with all those bad robots and yet when you knocked them to pieces you didn't even care that the reckless pace just demanded more quarters. It had improved graphics, better response, and that awesome multi player option. I always chose Nightcrawler.
Best moment in the game: For some reason the X-men in this game didn't really use their mutant abilities but a few times and it cost them dearly. However, unleashing your super move was always breath taking. My favorite was Nightcrawler's - he would zip all over the screen leaving a rainbow assortment of Nightcrawlers in his wake and anything that was in his path would be demolished. Visual candy.
Mortal Kombat (1992)
Warning: Video Contains Graphic Content
I can still remember the first time I caught sight of this game. I had never seen ANYTHING like it before and I just couldn't seem to take my eyes away from the screen. I must have stood there in the arcade for at least an hour and I wasn't even PLAYING the game. It was, by far, one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. These photo realistic characters were fighting each other and everything was so intense. From the creepy and tortured voice overs to the camera shakes to the brutal blood, gore, and fatalities. I had no idea that a game could be this insane. It literally changed the way I played video games for nearly a decade. Also, consider this. Up to this point, video games had been kind of a kid thing for me and my family. I'm sure that my parents figured we'd grow out of it. Also, up to this point the best part of playing my cherished side scrollers was playing with my brothers and dad. But when fighting games came out, they were more adult, and very much focused on the individual and his/her (but who are we kidding with 'her') own ability to master the controls vs. the calculated computer AI. Video games went from being a kid thing to a nerd thing...and I was perfectly okay with that.
Best moment in the game: There are so many that I can't really even pick just one, but here are a few. First thing I remember about the game is Raiden flying straight at his opponent, arms outstretched, screaming incoherent Japanese and slamming him against the back wall. The combination of the yelling and intense fighting was simply breathtaking. Second, Scorpion throwing a harpoon in his opponents chest which produced a rich amount of crimson blood and pulling him into melee range while screaming "Get over here!!" It's probably one of the most recognizable video game phrases of all time. Third, the fatalities. Gruesome, difficult to pull off, and ultimately the greatest way to show prowess over your opponent - computer or friend controlled.
Killer Instinct (1994)
When you are a kid you don't really experience video games the way the developers actually design them. Mostly because you can't really grasp the idea of depth in a game (or in anything for that matter). By the time Killer Instinct came out there were a zillion fighting games available in arcades and on home consoles so there was lots to choose from. Really good fighting games are, on the surface, playable by anyone but contain real depth so that a little time and understanding of the mechanics ensure that a pro would never be destroyed by a kid smashing all the buttons in a blind rage. So things like distance, strong and weak attacks, juggling, throws, and melee vs. projectile become important in finding a way to dismantle your foe. But the most important of these is the combo system. All great fighting games have some kind of combo system to help players string together moves that allow for more than just a back and forth interchange of fireballs to the face. A player who can master the combos would never be beat by his 5 year old brother. Killer Instinct took the idea of performing combos and placed it front and center in its game mechanics and gave the "special moves" that defined many early fighting games a back seat. They literally FORCED you to learn complex button and movement combinations and rewarded you for learning to go deeper and deeper with each character. It was like a light bulb clicked on for me. I went back later and found out that this wasn't a new concept...combos were always there in other games, but they were more like the best kept secret for the gaming pros. Killer Instinct let the cat out of the bag.
Best moment in the game: When you pulled off a combo, big or small, this announcer would shout out "Killer Combo" or "Super Combo!" or if you stopped somebody's combo, "COMBO BREAKER!" Each name 'killer, super, mega' that came before 'combo' was directly related to how many attacks you'd strung together. The best was if you could unleash more than like 20 attacks he would shout "ULTRAAAAA COMBOOOOO!" I was like he was shouting Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday all together.
Killer Instinct was the last game I devoted much time and money to in the arcades. Soon after, the N64, and Playstation were releasing such good games that it became pointless to waste the quarters. It used to be that all the newest games and best graphics came straight from the arcade, but these days the arcades can't hold a candle to the home experience. So they have evolved from what they once were. The hub of everything new and exciting for video games is more of a novelty now. A place where you can pick up big plastic reciprocating guns or stomp down on dance pads, or sit in a race car seat, or exchange thousands of tickets for a mug or plastic spider ring. I remember when going to the mall with mom was totally worth it if we could just have 20 min of arcade time. I'll always have fond memories of those places no matter how nerdy that makes me.
