Absolutely love Tempest, it's the one of the main reasons why I bought Atari Anthology for the PS2 (really a great little collection overall). I'm no whiz either at Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man, but I do enjoy playing it from time to time (kind of prefer Pac-Mania honestly). My college game room used to have a modded Pac-Man cocktail table and I would play it for hours, almost always racking up the high score. Don't know how I did it honestly, it must have been all the Twix bars and Mountain Dew Voltage I ingested on a constant basis

My favorite arcade coin-op was Gauntlet. The perfect distillation of hack-and-slash dungeon crawling, until Diablo I and then Diablo II came along. And the sinking health bar was a diabolically brilliant way to get me to keep feeding in quarters.

Never had Genesis.

Yeah, I gave those machines a lot of quarters, generally at 300 life each. On vacation one time I found a machine set to give 900 life per quarter! I stated until my parents dragged me away.

Wizard is about to die...

Yeah, those 1UP arcade cabinets are a great deal when you consider that most of the originals cost hundreds more. I saw a Pac-Man cocktail table variation that they had Costco a while ago and I kind of wanted it if only to relive my college game room days

Wow, so many old memories this arcade talk has brought up. Some free associating follows.

Joust was one of those games that I never clicked with as a player, but I enjoyed watching people who were good at it. A couple others like that were Defender and Robotron. I had a friend who I'd frequently arcade with who also couldn't handle multitasking Robotron's twin joysticks, so we'd sometimes team up. Strangely, when he moved and I fired, we did pretty well, but when I moved and he fired, we were terrible. Funny how that happens.

My friend's favorite games were Phoenix, which was a Galaga-like with birds, and Crazy Climber, which had you scaling tall buildings while dodging flowerpots and things dropped on you by residents. I think he also played Berzerk.

On Tempest, I was the person people would gather to watch. Sometimes this would include a girl who would compliment my playing and talk to me...and then invariably call her boyfriend to come watch too.

At one point, my arcade started holding a contest on a different game each week, with the high score for the week winning a prize. When Tempest's turn came, the prize was a Sony Walkman, which was still relatively new and expensive (especially for a kid with a couple dollars weekly allowance). I was, needless to say, stoked. I had my best ever Tempest session that week, running all the way through the blue, red, and yellow levels (where I usually stalled out), up to the beginning of the light blue. Needless to say, this gave me a great score, so I was flying high. After the contest, I went in to claim my prize, and was sympathetically told that a guy had come in the night before and put about $10 into the game to beat my score. (For those unfamiliar, Tempest was one of the games with a progression system, giving you a small window to start your next game where you left off the previous one, with a large score bonus for finishing the initial level.) That may have been my first-hand introduction to the reality that skill and effort aren't always enough to win if somebody with the means to work the system wants it more.

Silver Sue's was an awesome arcade. She had a huge variety of games and also ran a nice place, enforcing curfew for kids and keeping gang colors out. The tougher crowd went to Dennis' Place for Games a couple blocks down the street. Bonus: Chicago was the pinball and video game capital of the world, home to most of the major pinball and video companies, and a lot of Sue's regulars were game designers and artists. As a result, she even got to be a site for tester games.

I think the most deluxe arcade I ever saw was in Circus Circus casino in Reno circa 1982, it was too much to really take in.

I remember a roller disco place having a game in one corner called Gorf with talkative aliens grumbling in their alien language of some kind. It was sort of a deluxe Space Invaders but the aliens grumbling thing made it more fun. Now whether someone was spelling Frog backwards I don't know, but Midway was a U.S. company, right? So I'm thinking any of that was purely Canadian teenager rumour. Just as English people got labelled 'limey' based on having limes to combat scurvy on their ships, and Germans were called 'kraut' for having sauerkraut for the same reason, the French were 'frog' for eating frog's legs (If I have to pick based on food I'll go with the Germans actually).