Hey does anyone remember the old arcades from back in the day? For those younger gamers out there, they wouldn't understand the magic and coolness of it. Social gaming today means playing with people online. But in truth, it actually feels empty because even though you're talking with anyone from anywhere in the world while playing games, they're faceless. See, back in the day, social gaming meant literally socializing in real life, face to face.

But unfortunately, as tech evolved, some things died out. The arcades were one of those casualties. But if you could bring the arcade back in some semblance, what games would you use?

I know some I would use are:

• GI Joe
• Crazy Taxi
• Street Fighter 3
• Strider
• Pac-man

My cousin has a Mortal Kombat arcade machine. One of those retro rerelease thingies, but it’s pretty cool. Myself I think if I’d get an arcade machine, I’d go for one of those super classics like Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong or maybe even Pong itself.

Pac-man is one of those defacto machines to have if you're gonna start any kind of home arcade

I'm yet to pull the trigger on ordering one of the modern retro arcade cabinets, though the thing I don't like with them is they are all LCD instead of CRT based.
Original cabinets are way too expensive, Pac-Man is around $3500 alone, so that's a no-go for me.
At the moment I have CRT hooked up and 8BitDo stick for arcade gaming, but honestly, I would like actual cabinet.

Games I tend to play are mostly from the Golden era of arcades (around 1979-1983), games that I played mostly as a kid in 80s, and some that I missed, though I do play some later ones as well quite often (Metal Slug series and Raiden come to mind).

Some lightgun games, since those don't work on modern TFT displays.
Crazy Taxi was also a favorite of mine, though I suck at it (never got more than a dozen customers before time was up).

There's a few pretty good games that are stuck on Arcade and never saw a port to the Saturn or w/e.

That being said, my pick would be good ol' SF3.

The moment you said that, Alien vs Predator came to mind

If I had the money and the physical space, I would love to create a home arcade.

These are some of my essentials:

• Donkey Kong
• Pac-Man (or Ms. Pac-Man)
• TMNT: Turtles in Time
• NBA Jam

I wanted to say NBA Jam at first too. But I had chose Run and Gun since it's less known and was pretty dang great

There are a lot of console games from the 21st century that work well in the arcade with a little adaptation (or no adaptation):

Mario Kart 8
Super Smash Bros Ultimate
Puyo Puyo Tetris
Killer Queen
Castle Crashers
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Streets of Rage 4
Sonic Mania
Any 2D Mario from the past 20 years
Cadence of Hyrule
Rhythm games in general