Title says all. What good games do you know of that nobody will try because there is no practical way to play them?

 

Arcade games with weird controllers or necessary cabinets for the experience. Paperboy, 720, Hard Drivin', Tron, most rhythm games. Most of them only live on in collector's basements and home versions can never give you the same experience. All the great pinball machines for the same reason.

Some games just aren't on location anywhere in the world. Sega R360, if you didn't play it in like 1993 you pretty much can't anymore (unless there's like that French museum that still has one working?). I think there are 2 public Cyclopes pinball machines in the world, neither actually open to the public year round, and it's such an interesting game historically and designwise.

Truxton 2 looks good. Oh and the original Duke Nukem computer games, I really want to play those again.

As DefaultGen points out... there are quite a few pinball machines that are "an experience" that would be great for any gamer to have.


As a one-up to novelty arcade cabinets, in general... I have always wanted to make the trek to one of the Battletech simulator facilities that FASA built in the 90's.
Supposedly they were all bought, updated, and now maintained by long-time fans, so they are still out there.
But there are only a few.

The original After Burner with the tilting sit-down cab springs to mind. Time Traveler's holographic effects would be another.

Hard to think of any standard arcade game with normal controls that can't be played on Mame, or a console game that can't be emulated somehow.

 

I've answered this before in similar threads, but Food Fight. Ridiculously amazing game but you won't be able to play it anywhere but Arcade, Atari 7800, or Atari 8-bit. Wikipedia tells me it saw some kind of re-release on a now defunct Microsoft service.

Even more to your question, Gremlins for the Atari 5200. As far as I know, it's only there. And it's fantastic. And unlike most of the 5200 library, the joystick is quite appropriate for it.

I would love to see a reimagining of these two with updated graphics (but still 2d single-screen). Both are fantastic, addictive single-screen games that deserve a wider audience.

Time Traveler is a great example.


In terms of "standard games with normal controls"... it stretches the definition a LITTLE BIT, but 6-player XMen was one of the most memorable arcade gaming experiences of the early 90's.

Playing that game shoulder-to-shoulder with 5 other people is NOT the same experience as playing the same game sitting in your living room.


And having played the port/remaster of the Capcom AD&D arcade games, those were also both a much more novel experience on 4-player large screen showpiece cabinets.

 

Come to think of it, the first Darius game had an extremely wide aspect ratio using three CRTs. You could probably emulate it on a modern HDTV now, but for awhile the arcade was the only way to get that scope.

Emulation of those games is available in the digital library at the Internet Archive. Lots of great computer games from back in the day also. I get my Oregon Trial fix every so often using the site, since it feels sort of like playing it on an Apple II did.

I bet you could do pretty authentic time traveler and holoseum ports to VR. Not super practical and terrible games, but doable.

I still have Food Fight and Crystal Castles for Xbox 360. It was available from 2010-2015 in the Game Room App


I would say Golden Axe Warrior. I saw a copy in person yesterday but it was overpriced at $500

You can emulate that, easily, though.

 

Oh I see, well then I choose this

I'm scared to ask...





Another good arcade-only option though was Police 911.

Instead of the pedal like Time Crisis, you stood on a mat within a detector that moved the screen based on your physical position.

I was going to say X-Men as well, can't replicate that experience with emulation or online play, it's just not the same thing.

Another game I wanted to mention was Solar Assault, it's basically Gradius in 3-D.  Never seen the arcade machine anywhere so I can't say if it's actually any good but the full version with pneumatics has always been something I wanted to play.

 

I really feel like Warioland on virtual boy Should have been ported to the 3DS

Still really wanna play Sound Voltex 

This one probably doesn't count, but Toypop is a really obscure arcade game that hasn't gotten a rerelease in North America since the 90's. You can still emulate it and it will play just fine, but it's still one that hasn't had many ports. Unless you have a Sharp X1, X68000, or managed to download it on the Japanese Wii Virtual Console, then you'll only be able to play it through emulation or on Namco Museum Vol 1.

Sharp X68000. That’s one thing we need more ports of. Most of these games are arcade quality and aside from some Windows and Mac emulators, there’s not really a way to play. 

I would love them to bring a port of Nemesis 90 Kai onto the Switch.

 

All those sexy PC-98 games. You could emulate them, but you still have to know how to use the computers themselves. I managed to get a game to work once. It was a pain.

I'd normally answer Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy CoCo -- dubbed the best RPG of 1982 by the CRPG Addict -- but there was a fan-made DOS port made almost 25 years later, and apparently there's even a PSP port. So I'm not sure if fan-made ports rule it out. Still, it's an amazing game, and like nothing else I've ever played.

Otherwise, I dunno...Fire Truck in the arcade was pretty awesome, especially 2P, but it's hard to replicate that experience even in emulation.

I also enjoyed De Zaak van Sam, a surprisingly adult FMV game made for the CD-i by Dutch film students. It hasn't been dumped (AFAIK), is quite rare, and can't really be played on NTSC systems unless you speak Dutch because the English subtitles are offscreen. I don't know if it's a "good game everyone should play" since it's really quite short and limited, but it's certainly one of the more memorable and entertaining FMV games I've ever played.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath

This sounds like the original author released the game as freeware after Radio Shack let the publishing rights lapse so that they reverted back to the author.

Are there decent Tandy CoCo emulators?

 

CoCo emulation is in pretty good shape. I remember that MESS (now part of MAME) did a very good job back in the day. The Windows port (also available on Mac at one time, and Linux as well) will give you more or less the same experience, but runs a bit quicker which makes the game significantly harder when you reach the toughest part of the game (the 4th floor of the dungeon).

And yeah, isn't it nice that we have the source code to this seminal game? It's a huge coup that that was made available.

Just get an FM Towns Marty to play Truxton 2.

 

Police 911 got a PS2 port in Japan (where it was called The Keisatsukan) and it used a camera for the motion detection.  I'm not sure how well it worked though.  I would guess that the arcade version would be a better experience.