Business management meets arcade gaming in Arcade Paradise, an indie game where you build an arcade business from the back room of a dilapidated laundromat. Of course, the place won’t be run down for long as customers stop by and witness the nostalgic neon wonderland you’ve started to create.
Slots aren’t just assets in Arcade Paradise – you can also play the games you buy. With over 30 games to choose from, it can be hard to know what to spend your hard-earned cash on.
10 Communists of Mars
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While the cabinets in Arcade Paradise pay tribute to multiple eras of arcade gaming, the overall aesthetic of the game is unmistakably 1980s. While it’s not much of an issue that many of the cabinets you can buy in Arcade Paradise don’t fitting into the 80s atmosphere, any cabinet that matches this atmosphere automatically becomes a more attractive purchase.
There’s no closet more apt for the 80s in Arcade Paradise than Communists From Mars, a simple shooter that replaces aliens with communists to make a brilliant joke about the communism-centric paranoia of the 80s.
9 barkanoid
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Barkanoid is a simple Breakout clone with one major change to the stone-breaking formula: the paddle is a Dachshund. In addition to bringing a sausage dog to Breakout, Barkanoid also adds some minor gameplay tweaks like lasers and changing the size of the dog to keep you interested while losing lives because you’re too busy staring at the dog. .
Just adding an animal and a few extra mechanics to an existing game isn’t going to set the world on fire. It definitely makes Barkanoid worth buying for those times when you need some cute animal therapy after unblocking the laundromat toilets.
8 Zombie 2
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Zombat 2 is a twin stick shooter with a surprisingly punishing learning curve. It’s also another example of Arcade Paradise’s commitment to making its series of cabinets timeless by merging multiple eras of games.
In the case of Zombat 2, simplistic 80s-style graphics and gameplay are combined with upgrade and store systems that you would expect in a modern title. While Zombat 2’s gameplay is a bit shallow for the genre, there’s no other game quite like it in Arcade Paradise’s lineup, making it a must-buy for your arcade.
7 Racer Chaser
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Arcade Paradise is full of genre mashups. Perhaps the most bizarre among them is Racer Chaser, a game that fuses Pac-man with the top-down Grand Theft Auto games. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds. The gameplay demands more from Pac-man than GTA, where you primarily drive a car driving through a city from a top-down perspective, fleeing cops who take the place of Pac-man’s ghosts.
Ignoring the absurdity of the mashup, Racer Chaser is actually a pretty faithful tribute to Pac-man, almost like one of those obscure Pac-man spin-off games that were all over the 2000s.
6 The Adventure of Woodgal
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Woodgal’s Adventure is one of the most fleshed out games in Arcade Paradise and comes with a gameplay loop that could have easily come out of the early 2010s mobile app stores. In most of Woodgal’s Adventure, you traverse a Toejam & Earl-esque overworld, fighting in combat with mechanics reminiscent of Candy Crush and his legion of copycats.
While Woodgal’s Adventure certainly doesn’t have the prettiest aesthetic of the games in Arcade Paradise, its gameplay and overall shine ranks among the arcade’s best cabinets.
5 cyber dance
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Cyber Dance is arguably the game most at odds with the arcade’s predominantly ’80s aesthetic, thanks to its resemblance to the late ’90s arcade phenom Dance Dance Revolution. However, any potential timeline issues that Cyber Dance could cause are soon forgiven. After all, how do you make an arcade tycoon game without a Dance Dance Revolution clone?
While it’s definitely a really cool game to have in your arcade (and a great money maker), Cyber Dance’s lack of iconic dance pad peripherals dampens the gameplay considerably. It settles for a typical WASD/arrow keys rhythm game with a DDR skin. Thankfully, the nostalgia this skin creates is still cool enough to put it on this list.
4 Vostok 2093
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Vostok 2093 is Arcade Paradise’s only shoot-em-up, a safe yet satisfying homage to the classic arcade genre. It’s also a pretty good take on it. The Galaga influence is everywhere and obvious, and not necessarily a bad thing. Waves of enemy aliens, special weapons, and bosses all appear in Vostok 2093, and they all work to a great extent.
The biggest flaw of Vostok 2093 is the genre. Shoot-em-ups have seen a major revival in recent years. Anyone who’s played one of the excellent new entries in the genre will probably spend their time playing Vostok and wonder why they don’t play one of those better standalone shoot-em-ups instead.
3 Space Race Simulator
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Space Race Simulator is one of the most blatant tributes to Arcade Paradise, a racing game derived from Sega’s Outrun. While Arcade Paradise’s take on ’80s arcade racing lacks the non-linear progression and depth of the game it’s based on, it still delivers in the gameplay department.
The visual and audio presentation are incredibly sleek, and the controls are reliable enough to send you into a nostalgia so deep you’ll google how much it would cost to ship an Outrun cabinet to your living room.
2 Knuckles and knees
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Knuckles & Knees is a surprisingly elaborate beat-em-up inspired by the Final Fight series. The relative depth and length of Arcade Paradise’s attempt at this classic arcade genre makes it the best traditional cabinet in the game.
Knuckles & Knees is also in a unique position to bring nostalgia to some of Arcade Paradise’s younger players, thanks to the incredible longevity of the Simpsons and TMNT beat-em-up cabinets that took the world by storm in the 90s and 2000.
1 Video Air hockey
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Video Air Hockey has been with you from the beginning of Arcade Paradise and is the perfect game to come back to from time to time, even in the later hours of the game. The remarkably simple graphics have it leaning hard into the nostalgic realm of the CRT screen that Arcade Paradise creates when it’s at its best.
The choice to have Video Air Hockey available right at the start of the game is genius. The ever-present air hockey machines in arcades almost certainly guarantee that playing Video Air Hockey will remind you of your favorite days spent in arcades, prompting you to build your own arcade empire in their honor.
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