Awesome MAME roms

I guess you could have seen this coming.

Being that I use a trackball instead of a regular mouse, I have intuitive input for trackball games.  Meaning I can play Marble Madness and feel like I'm in the fucking arcade.  (MAGFest's "everything set to Free Play" arcade of win had a Marble Madness cabinet last year, between that and the cocktail Pac-Man cabinet, shit was so cash)

One game that I keep going back to even after ragequitting from other games is Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa.  The story is kind of cheesy.  Moo Mesa gets hit by this energy beam from outer space, and all the cows on it mutate and become more...  anthropomorphic.  It's a western setting (well, duh), and you're playing as Marshall Moo and his party as they go around, shoot the bad cows, and try to rescue Lily Bovine.  It plays really well, movement is fluid and you can easily aim in any direction.  Kind of like Contra...  oh wait.  Both games were made by Konami.  No wonder.  I can beat the first stage and its boss without getting hit.  Not so much the rest of the game, but hey, at least I don't have to spend quarters...  Also, I love that beer bottles are your health powerup.

A classic that I loved in arcades is Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road.  I dunno who Ivan "Ironman" Stewart is, but the game is awesome.  Basically you race around dirt tracks in a truck and if you win you get to continue and upgrade your truck.  If you ever saw a cabinet with three steering wheels, that's what it was.  It supports the trackball in MAME, so I have fairly fluent control.

If you want decent arcade fighters, to be honest, look no further than the Neo-Geo.  There you'll find Last Blade/Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Shodown, and more.  I actually own an import copy of Garou: Mark of the Wolves for PS2.  It's just that awesome.

Two non-Neo-Geo fighters that are pretty decent (and both made by the same company, Strata/Incredible Technologies) are Blood Storm and Time Killers.  Both have fairly similar gameplay.  Each character has a weapon, and with a well-placed hit (usually a counterhit) you can cut off your opponent's arms.  Everyone has a special move (that's damn hard to pull off too) that can decapitate the enemy and give an instant win.  Matches don't really last very long, but they're fun games.

Another classic: The Simpsons.  Konami brings us this beat-em-up which so happens to be the best Simpsons game ever made.  I remember dumping so many quarters into this in the arcades.

On the subject of beat-em-ups, we can't forget Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.  The arcade version is way better than the Genesis version.  You're going around blasting bad guys, synchronized dancing to the death, and rescuing kids.  This was before all the child molestation allegations.  Oh and if you find his monkey you can turn into mecha-Michael Jackson.  Sega...  you made some awesome games, and then this quirky stuff.

Now for weird games.  First up: Maruchan de Goo!  If the "Maruchan" part of the name made you think of ramen, you're on the right track.  It's a game about making ramen, eating it, serving it to customers, and other stuff.  It was made by Sega.

Next up: Dancing Eyes.  This is one of many adult-oriented arcade games.  You walk around on this grid which happens to be superimposed on the clothing of a female.  You can mark sections of it, and when you close off a section the clothing beneath disappears.  There's enemies and powerups.  ...Yeah.  Namco's responsible for this one.

Then there's Pachinko Sexy Reaction (and its sequel).  You're playing pachinko.  If you do well, you get to peek in on a female changing (you get caught, it's funny) and they put on a costume of some sort.  As the game goes on everything gets more suggestive.  The responsible company is Sammy (anyone who's played a Guilty Gear game knows of them).

There's plenty more, obviously, but that's a random selection out of what I've discovered at random/remembered from arcades.