My top ten arcade games of all time

A friend on a private board recently asked me what my favorite arcade games of all time were. So here they are in the order thay came to me:

Tempest still has a weird hold on my imagination. When I saw it in roller rinks and bowling alleys back in the very early 80s, I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. I've never revised my opinion downwards--having barely played it since then and not having had my memories smeared by playing it recently, it still makes me a little dizzy just thinking about it.

Star Wars: More good vector wireframe action. There's a reason this style still forms a basis of what we think is the future looks like. I've actually been playing this recently on my Wii, and prefer it to the much more elaborate GameCube game it was bundled with. There's still something to be said for having your mind fill in the blanks here and there.

Gauntlet: My dad would get pissed when he'd take my cousins and me to the local theme park and we'd want to pump quarters into this rather than run around and ride the rides.

Golden Tee: Good bar fun. I never even played it that much, but I have a ton of memories bullshitting with my college buddies over the course of many games.

Galaga: Perfect in its simplicity, anyone can pick it up and have some laughs in seconds. It also has the "but can it run Linux"-type factor of being available on everything from Palm Pilots to the newest consoles.

Tekken 2: I pick the second one only because it was the first one I saw and it blew my mind wide open. After not owning a console since the Mattel Intellivision, I went out and got the Playstation to play Tekken 3, the PS2 for Tekken 4, and will probably cave in on the PS3 for Tekken HD or whatever they call it. I've seen vegan hippies playing this game turning into monsters, screaming, "Take it! Oh, is that how your Daddy used to give it to you?"

Elevator Action: Significantly less classic than most everything else on the list, for some reason this one always had lines among my friends at the roller rink in 5th grade. I've always wanted to go back and see how it stacks up. But at the time, the interactivity with the environment made it seem like fun.

Q*bert: I probably got gimmicked by the faux-3Dness of it at the time.

Dig Dug: Getting into some pretty stock choices here, but I still like playing it, probably because your enemies actually blew up rather than vanishing.

Finally, Asteroids, due to the aforementioned good times back in the day.

I should say for the record that I always have and will suck at Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, and I've never been able to get into Super Mario Brothers, even the new one. My favorite early console game was Tron Deadly Discs for the Intellivision. Dear God, look at that screenshot, but it was fun as hell.