Arcade gaming is the top.
I find myself playing a lot of it because it's audio-visually more appealing than most of older console stuff.
BUT ( there's always a "but" )! Arcade stuff/gear can be too troublesome.
Arcade pcb's ( mostly ) can be a pain and you'll find yourself trying more to learn/repair that shit instead of playing it.
I like 'em both.
I turn on my Supergun more often than most consoles I own, but some console games cannot be replaced.
There's just too much of console goodies that you don't have on arcade too.
You don't have a Super Metroid on arcades. You don't have decent 2D Castlevania ( 3D ones are crap ) and so on.
Than you have Neo Geo ( Arcade perfect ) and Saturn and PSX where most ports of Arcade games were perfect or near that.
It all comes to a reasoning when you have to buy a PCB version of a game that is perfectly ported that may cost you 300 bucks when you can have the same EXACT game ( sometimes with other goodies ) for less than $50.
Games like Ray Force on the Saturn are a good example of this. I'd love to get my hands on a PCB of that beauty, but the 10secs it takes to load into gameplay doesn't bother me much. It's a shooter and it barely has to load anything.
Fighting games for that matter is a complete different story tho.
I can't see myself playing KOF with my friends with the console loading between rounds, chars select and so on.
It simply is a buzz killer. Neo Geo CD versions are cool to own, if you want to have a different feeling playing the same game with an AST instead of the original musical chiptunes. But that's about it.
For each his own.
And there's also the situation when console games are way more expensive than the SUPERIOR arcade parts. Which is, IMO a total sacrilege.
Not so much for the NTSC versions, but PAL versions of Sunset Riders are usually way more expensive than the GODLIKE Arcade PCB.
It's shameful.
Fatal Fury 2 for the PAL Mega Drive cost nearly as much as an AES with Fatal Fury 2. Or maybe more.
It's simply ridiculous paying more to have less. No matter if it's collectible or not.
I myself have all 3 Sunset Riders ( MD, SNES, JAMMA ). If I didn't had the console versions first before having the PCB of that one, I probably would have never got them unless it was a decent deal/trade or whatever.
Keeping stuff to maintain your nostalgia passion up is cool. Wheater you play them or not.
Spending useless amounts of cas on stuff you don't really feel related to is plain dumb.
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