I'd love to find a copy of Altered Beast again. Golden Axe was fun, too, but a little short; remember winning it at Flickers on about five bucks worth of tokens split between us? The ending movie was cute; if I think about it for a moment, I can probably hum the the closing theme.

The arcades were the first casualty of the console wars, but when I get a chance to visit one of the few surviving ones (a lot of movie theaters have mini arcades with half a dozen games or so), my favorite games now are the Silent Scope series -- the one gun game that depends more on precision than on just blasting away at everything that moves on the screen.

You mentioned Star Control 2 -- did I tell you I found a free, open source port of the 3DO version of the game that Reiche and Ford released a few years ago? You can download it at http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. Because it was the 3DO version, there's a package you can install to add voiceovers for all the dialogue. It's a mixed bag -- some voices, notably the Commander's, are disappointing, but some are spot-on -- particularly the Yehat (they got someone who does a decent Scottish brogue to record their dialogue), the Dill-Rats, the Druuge, and the Fat Obstreperous Jerks (Eway Aryay Addashthray! Ortsnay!). That link leads to a video of something I don't recall that we ever thought of: going to the Druuge with a command ship whose module spaces are all filled with high-capacity fuel tanks, and only one unit of fuel in them, and trading an artifact for "all the fuel your ship can hold." They don't take it very well....