As far as fighters: Virtua Fighter 1 and Tekken 3 were my favorites. Fighters later got too complicated for me, though--I have VF4: Evolution on the PS2, with the special Hori stick that I had to import, and I can't do crap with it.

As far as other games: Back in the day I was a master of the original Gauntlet. Other kids in the arcade would occasionally pay for my games in order to have me along as a guide through the dungeons.

And shooters: it never got better than R-Type for me.

P.S. I went to an arcade in Philadelphia a couple of months ago, the first time I'd been inside an arcade in years, and was surprised at how crap they are now. 80% of the games were quarter-eating light gun games, and the other 20% were quarter-eating driving games. Actually, "quarter-eating" is the wrong term: instead of using quarters there was some wacky system where you had to pay for a debit card with "units" on it, and each game cost some fractional number of "units" like 1.6--all of this was presumably designed to disguise the fact that you were paying some ungodly sum of money to play these games.

I miss you, Malibu Fun Center circa 1987.

Virtua Fighter, hands-down.

Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung-Fu sucked many of my quarters. Yes, I am old.

Oh, I hear you, though I never really liked VirtuaFighter. It was always too clunky. Tekken III and Tekken Tag were excellent games, though I had a roomie who was too into 'em. It was always either Marvel Superheroes or Xmen for me, both on the Street Fighter engine.

And as far as games that I miss— I loved Elevator Action Returns with a white-hot passion, and so wish that game were available for the Playstation II or my mac. Sure, some of it was incomprehensible (these terrorists seemed mighty vague about their aims), but when I played as the girl, I could get through the whole game (well, to the boss) on one quarter. I especially liked the comments next to the high scores; I remember feeling elated when the game posted a "wow" next to mine.

Aside from that, I liked the Raiden a lot, and have always been a bit of a Galaga badass, if I might brag. Lately, I've been sticking to pinball, but my favorite bars have taken 'em out in favor of fuckin' Kino gambling. WTF?

Oh, and for light gun shooters (which I do like on occassion) I still go for Lethal Enforcers, because they game is so damn perverse in its views on justice.

Karate Champ, not particularly for nostalgia reasons, but because I think the two joystick only interface never reached its full potential.

But realistically speaking, Tekken.

People have mentioned some good candidates here (Karate Champ and Virtua Fighter among others), but I think the best arcade fighting game for its time was either Mortal Kombat II (fast, addictive, deceptively deep) or Soul Calibur (beautiful, thoughtful, elegant). I feel like I'm forgetting a few, though.

Samurai Showdown and Primal Rage were both moderately popular fighting franchises, but neither one is anywhere near GOAT status.

I love Tekken... We have it for our playstation. We also have Time Crisis, which the BF likes.

I haven't played any fighters for a while but I always liked Tekken 1 through 3, Mortal Kombat 1 through 3 or somewhere abouts there and the Street Fighter 2 incarnations. I think my 2nd favorite fighter is Tekken 2 but my all-fav is Muscle Bomber Duo/Saturday Night Slam Masters.

Oh, yeah, I always liked Samurai Showdown and was preternaturally good at Soul Caliber, but always hated Primal Rage. That game was never as good as it should have been.

Never played any of the newer games. Never been big on fighting games, SF2 was fun for a while but it got old fast. Mortal Kombat sucked after you got past snickering at people's hearts getting ripped out.

Now as for schmups...

Gradius V for PS2 is fantastic.

That's true of so many long-running game series, that they're never quite as good as they should've been. I wish I knew why it worked that way.

Also: War Gods, Darkstalkers, Battle Arena Toshinden, Dead or Alive... I could go on like this.

Also also: Shmups? Ikaruga!

I've always liked the VF series over the Tekken, as the chains in Tekken are soooooo frikken hard to pull off!! Sure, they look way cool when you're able to do it, but I don't want to spend a coupla hours getting the timing down to microseconds to switch moves. But that's me.
Also - Soul Calibur series rocks, and I agree with you on Primal Rage, klang. It was really good, but after a while it sorta stopped doing it for me.

Yes! Game nostalgia!!

I never really did 3-D fighters. Basically SNK/Neo Geo was all good stuff for little kid me. Especially the Engrish in some of them. Aero Fighters, Metal Slug, Samurai Showdown, King of Fighters, Fatal Fury ("BURNING KNUCKLE!!!!!"), World Heroes (some of the crazier and cheesier characters out of the Neo Geo fighting game universe. And that's saying a lot when you come from a cannon of characters that includes this dude and this dude). Not really a franchise, but still part of the Neo Geo brood: Magician Lord. I mention this because I remember the arcade having that for a couple of months before yanking it and I went half crazy trying to remember this game for years and everyone who I'd talk to about it wouldn't remember.

Capcom was good too. I was really digging the whole Alpha series, though they lost me around Street Fighter III, and really lost me with the 3-D Street Fighter, but Rival Schools was pretty sweet. Darkstalkers is always a favorite that I like to dig out for the Saturn. Especially the whole "Dimitri can turn any other character into a chick" move was entertaining. The whole giant baby in the background in the last stage where you fight Jeddah from Darkstalkers: Vampire Savior gave me the heebie jeebies though.

Speaking of scary games, I still find the release of the first Resident Evil to be a pretty huge milestone in my gaming history. At the same time does anyone remember Tecmo's Deception? That game was all kinds of creepy to me back in the day.

I remember really getting into the whole versus series, starting out obviously with X-Men vs. Street Fighter. It was good ridiculous fun. It was one thing fighting the giant fist of Apocalypse, but I nearly lost it when I found myself facing Cyber Akuma in Marvel Superheroes vs. Street Fighter. Marvel vs. Capcom? A little gimmicky maybe, but still, Mega Man and Jill Valentine as a fighting characters! Some might say it was cheesy, but I loved that series to bits. I especially enjoyed it when the Capcom artists and SNK artists switched to render the character artwork from each others' games for SNK vs. Capcom.

And just to get them out of the way: Knights of the Round, Final Fight, Golden Axe, Captain Commando.

Most are emulate-able I suppose, but nonetheless, I miss the arcading =(.

I didn't mention Golden Axe or Final Fight because they aren't really in the genre everyone else was talking about but Saturday Night Slammers is kind of a mixture of the two styles. And yeah, I remember Tecmo's Deception. It was so fun playing a bad guy for a change.

And one of the stranger characters from World Heroes: Rasputin.

Oh, and now that I'm really thinking about it, my FAVORITE fighter is Eternal Champions, which I actually download a rom of not too long ago. Now I just need time to play it. (BTW, Eternal Champions has probably the most awkward stage fatalities ever.)

Tekken III. I loved that Game. Oh how much did I love it.

WORLD HEROES! That was what I was thinking of! I loved that game.
Fatal Fury— Joe Higashi was too easy to be cheap with, but that's why I always played as him against the computer. I'd usually choose someone else to play against my brother.
Battle Arena Toshinden— I liked the girl with the whip, but I don't remember the game very well, frankly.
Dead or Alive— Their cabinets always replaced Tekken at our arcade, and I never liked it. Just unintuitive on the controls, which is also the reason I never really dug Mortal Combat. I hated having to hold block, y'know?
Dark Stalkers— Always seemed like the fighting game to play if everything else was taken. I never really liked any of the characters until they got rolled into the mega fighters of the late '90s. But it seemed to be the cabinet most likely to show up at Pizza Huts.


"I've always liked the VF series over the Tekken, as the chains in Tekken are soooooo frikken hard to pull off!! Sure, they look way cool when you're able to do it, but I don't want to spend a coupla hours getting the timing down to microseconds to switch moves. But that's me."

Well, on the one hand, I had a roommate who practiced incessantly to master those combos. On the other hand, I never found things like a four hit combo from Hwoarng (or whatever his name was) particularly hard. Sure, getting the 10 hit grab from King is damn hard, but he's like Zangief— if you can master him, you can beat anyone.

Whoops, got a little too excited once I got on talking about Neo Geo and forgot the main focus of fighting games.

World Heroes was indeed great and I think I sunk more quarters into that than I did Fatal Fury even though they almost always were hosted on the same cabinet (one of those SNK/NeoGeo, three or four games in one cabinet business). Disturbing Fatal Fury trivia: I think it was if you used a projectile attack on a female character whose life bar was extremely low her shirt would blow apart? I think this only worked for King in the first Fatal Fury, but then in subsequent ones it also worked on other characters like Yuri.

The sprites for KOF games were fantastic. It was (and probably still is, since I haven't played its more recent incarnations) a very character driven game series. Each character had their own detailed mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, especially for their more distinctive characters. For example, how Iori Yagami had a lurching, arrogant, hands-in-his-pockets walk. Or how his kicks looked because of the belt that tied his legs together. Or just watch how Shermie moved and her attacks looked.