I did the somersault too, but usually followed that up with a "Jamping Back Kick." :)

70's - Warrior by Cinematronics :)

80's - Karate Champ. FULL POINT!

90's - Street Fighter II Turbo. Basically I'd pick Blanka, mash random buttons and hope for the best. For the longest time I thought Zangief was saying "Yogurt Fiber."

00's - By then I had moved on permanently from arcade/console to PC, so I lost track of fighters

Another Baseball Stars fan here, I started out playing the SNK "Professional" version at the arcade and got hooked on the Lovely Ladies as my team (and yes I'm male). I saved up my allowance to get the NES version at Kay-Bee and spent a ton of my summer playing with the Ladies (ok that sounded wrong), keeping stats, etc. I even threw a perfect game with my ace "Lian" on the mound. In fact I still remember the last pitch in the 9th, as my gassed starter gave everything she had. 49 mph, outside...swung on and missed.

On the flip side, Bad News Baseball might be the worst NES baseball title...but I think it's the funniest. The cartoons were a riot!

Haha, yes I remember both of those games! Were those your favorites? I wasn't a huge shooter fan but I do know Area 51. TMNT was a multi-player co-op "quarter eater," kind of like Simpsons, Gauntlet, Rampage. I loved how you could just go to the arcade and instantly bond with whoever was playing. X-Men was really something special...6 players at once!

So basically, I'm no longer a fan of the typical "3 lives and game over" scheme in most 80's video games. I prefer something that is "winnable" and doesn't just rely on faster and faster reflexes to stay alive...especially since age has not kept my reflexes completely intact :)

Definitely 90's. While I spent most of my allowance on arcade and Atari games from the 80's, that style of gaming just doesn't hold my interest anymore. Also, I remember with great pain the horrid BEEP BOOP BEEP of the PC's internal speaker before Ad Lib/Sound Blaster came to the rescue. Once that happened, I became a PC gamer for life and never looked back. Good things start with S: Starcraft (W95), Stratego (DOS), Solitaire (3.1) are probably the games I play the most these days.

That's a bummer, I wonder what ads were in the original post. To replenish the stock in the meantime...

I agree to some extent, but more on the quality side. I love multiplayer. Not so much public games where you have to deal with immature 13-year-olds, but LAN gaming is where it's at for me. League of Legends, Torchlight 2...plus an occasional game of Broodwar.

As to quality, I've seen some real bombs lately. The 2017 update of Dragon's Lair on Steam is terrible. The timing of the moves is completely different from the original, and a real slap in the face to those who grew up with the arcade version. Luckily Steam allows you to roll back to the good version (at least for now).

I don't know for sure if it was a cost-cutting measure to align PC/consoles/mobile, or cater to online platforms like Steam and GOG Galaxy, but it's what I strongly suspect. I can't imagine why else they'd ruin a good thing. In the end, I feel like the small niche of old school gamers gets hurt more than the industry or the masses. It's frustrating.

While I still play Atari, there's one huge gameplay element that is largely missing - no, not graphics, but cooperative play. It just wasn't a concept in those days. I guess you can kind of play Superman and Space Invaders that way (maybe even Riddle of the Sphinx - oh joy, I want to play the black box!) but it's pretty lame. Since I'm a huge co-op player now, the ol' 2600 just doesn't hold my attention the way it used to.

Whoever mentioned Skate or Die and Bard's Tale is my long lost twin, those were seriously my jam back in the day.

Honorable mentions: Alice in Wonderland (very much like a Lucas Arts adventure) and Little Computer People (think Sims, 2-d style).

A working Atari 2600. Used to have the original home version of Pong (standalone console with paddles built-in) but it stopped working.

Also lying around in various places: GBC, N64, Atari Lynx. A friend of mine had that last one in college and I lusted after it until I got a job and could finally afford one, 5 years later. The Bill & Ted game is...well, excellent!