Obscure mame games

However, there were many games that never received the notoriety they deserved. Check out these obscure arcade games that should have eaten more quarters than they did. However, despite a premise that sounds as appealing as yard work, Timber is a very fun game.

Using two joysticks one to move and one to swing your axe , players could chop down trees, avoid beehives thrown by agitated bears, and flee from menacing birds. Although everyone loves flannel, the real appeal of this game is the simultaneous two-player axe swinging and log rolling. The game shared some similarities with its predecessor, but it took things to another level by adding a 3-dimensional element to the game.

No longer do players simply hop from platform to platform—they have to rotate a color cube to match a specific pattern by hopping to the next one.

Coily the snake was gone, but Meltniks, Soobops and Rat-A-Tat-Tat were added to the mix of characters to aggravate the player. Once the player matches five cubes qubes?

Well, Nibbler was a souped up version of that same game, but released in ! What is it with damsels in distress being forcibly held captive by monkeys? You earn points in this game by jumping over escaped animals while you rebuild their enclosure and return them to captivity. The storyline in Mad Planets is a little difficult to recognize, other than to say you control a spacecraft that is under attack from planets that, for some reason, are mad.

Though the concept behind the game is weak, the action is intense! If you get big enough while avoiding the deadly clutches of various sink obstacles, you can slip down the drain and into another sink.

Bubbles shows off a unique idea in turning the player into a more vulnerable target as the bubble nears its goal, and the controls mimic that idea without being too slippery. It was enough of a rejection to make Bubbles a B-lister in arcades… and only in arcades. Bubbles was never ported to home consoles or computers in its own time, and it only came home in compilations of Williams arcade games decades down the road.

Made by Irem back in , the original R-Type set new standards with its relentless difficulty, its novel design, and the freaky alien embryo boss of its first level. And its sequels were similarly appreciated. Well, most of them were. R-Type Leo is the odd one of the family. You can continue right where you left off, and a second player can join in as well. The arcade-going public embraced most of the good ones and even a couple of the really awful ones. The sequel, Asura Buster , improves on all of this in various little ways.

And Undercover Cops has plenty of little gameplay touches: the heroes can swing around girders and stone pillars, while everything from fish to junked Humvees can be thrown at your greasy opponents. It was also rushed. Back in , Irem released a scaled-down version of the game in Western markets, while Japan got an improved edition with more moves, music, and visual touches.

Most were short, easily grasped quests that followed a straight line. A superior sequel to a mediocre Famicom title, The Legend of Valkyrie sends a Norse battle-maiden hopping all over the place in her mission to save all humanity. Gauntlet became one of the most influential and important video games ever made, turning geeks into Gods overnight. Ikari Warriors may have been lacking its own submachine gun attachment, which had helped make games like Operation Wolf so appealing, but it did have a rotating joystick meaning players could run in one direction and shoot in another.

Most kids these days probably only know Rampage as a movie starring Dwayne Johnson , but for those of us with a few more miles on the clock, Rampage was an awesome arcade video game in which players took control of 1 of 3 giant monsters intent on smashing the shit out of various cityscapes across America.

Out Run was the video game of the year, selling an unprecedented 20, cabinets in its first year alone. No surprise when you lay your eyes upon the sleek, shiny body of the first-ever sit-down deluxe driving cabinet. Who can forget the temptation of the added Uzi, attached to the Operation Wolf cabinet, calling out to kids all over the world like a submachine gun siren?

For many of us, Operation Wolf was our first experience of a first-person rail-shooter and opened our eyes to the gritty realism of 2-dimensional, side-scrolling war.

Well, well, well. Our parents called it the coin-guzzler, as it feasted upon our pocket money hour after hour, day after day. But that was the truly great thing about this game — it had a neverending replay value because you just knew that with one more coin you could beat that ugly alien once and for all and make it to the next level.

Konami were world-beaters during this era of arcade video gaming, and their spin on the then white-hot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property was first class. Golden Axe provided me and my friends with everything we could ever have wanted back in — swords, sorcery and scantily clad babes.

Thank you SEGA. Mad Dog McCree was more like a movie than a video game, and it was also one of the most expensive games in the arcade. Developed by the legendary team at Capcom, the game capitalized on the success of Final Fight , rather than its own predecessor, which had been a commercial flop, and created the most enduring fight tournament known to man. Without question, The Simpsons game is the be-all and end-all when it came to the arcades.

Developed by Konami , and set in your typical Old West locale, Sunset Riders was a run and gun adventure game in which players could select 1 of 4 bounty hunters who must eliminate the most wanted outlaws in the land, claiming rewards at the end of each successive stage, which they presumably used to buy those fancy yellow pants and ponchos they wear throughout the game. Nigel Mansell moustaches were an optional extra. Also just like Operation Wolf , I was absolutely terrible at aiming and almost never made it past the first stage.

Street Fighter II set the bar impossibly high back in , so Midway needed to do something pretty special to drag the crowds of children to their new beat-em-up instead. They did just that by adding layer upon layer of ultra-violence! Where is justice? Where is punishment? Or have you already answered, have you already said to the world here is justice, here is punishment, here, in me. The arcades were littered with excellent racing sims, especially in the s, but none was more influential and well-received as Sega Rally Championship — and boy, look at those graphics!

Unlike many rail shooters of the era, Virtua Cop called for players to actually be able to aim their weapon at the bad guys, instead of simply shooting around them to get a kill. This was made all the harder by the high frame rate and the constant barrage of terrorist enemies.

Chicks loved a guy on a Jet Ski, bro! Your traditional rail-shooters were all pretty much the same by However, this time Namco had added a pedal that allowed players to duck for cover and avoid taking a bullet to the face — something that had never been done before.

Bearing absolutely no resemblance to any of the Jurassic Park movies, The Lost World arcade port was an easy money maker for Sega, placing gamers on the notorious Isla Sorna as they hunt for Dr.

Ian Malcolm hello Jeff! House of the Dead did for arcade games what Resident Evil did for survival horror on the home console, and was an instant smash in the arcades. There are tons of these around but Dance Dance Revolution was by far the greatest. Power Stone is probably best remembered as a Dreamcast title, but for a brief time in the very late nineties, it was also a radical 3D arcade fighter that allowed combatants to make use of their environments as weapons to ensure a hard-fought victory.