Everybody asks me the same question when I’m working the floor: “What’s your favorite game in here?”
Fair warning, the answer changes. My tastes drift. Something I’m obsessed with in September might get replaced by whatever I fixed last week or whatever movie I just watched. The floor changes too. We rotate cabinets, we add new machines, we pull games for repairs and swap in something else. A list like this has a shelf life.
So this is not a hall of fame. This is not my all-time top 5. This is what I’m walking over to play on a slow Thursday afternoon right now, today, in the fall of 2026. Ask me again in six months and many of these may have changed.
Counting down from 5.
5. Mappy
Namco, 1983. You are a mouse cop. You are bouncing on trampolines through a mansion, stealing back radios and televisions and paintings from a gang of cats, and slamming doors in their faces to stun them. That is the entire premise, and it is perfect.
Mappy is one of those early 80s designs that did not need a story or a cutscene to hook you. The vertical trampoline movement gives it a rhythm that almost no other game from that era has. You are not just running left and right, you are managing your bounce, watching how many times you have hit a trampoline before it tears, and timing door hits so a cat is standing in exactly the wrong place. The micro-doors that blast the cats down the hall are still one of the most satisfying risk-reward mechanics in a game that old.
And the music. That bouncing, looping, absolutely relentless Mappy theme is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in arcade history. It gets stuck in your head for three days. Ask our staff.
There is also a personal reason this one is on the list. I completely rebuilt this cabinet for Time Rift and filmed the whole restoration. It came in really rough and left the shop looking like new. When you have had a machine apart down to bare wood, you have a different relationship with it. Every time I play it I am looking at the art and the control panel thinking, yeah, that turned out great.
4. San Francisco Rush
My step-son Connor came to me with a request. There was a driving game he played as a kid at the after-school day care program he was in. He loved it. He could not remember the name, the studio, or anything except for how it played and that “it was a big green driving game.”
Mike Woods, one of our partners, had a San Francisco Rush cabinet that had been dead for years. We pulled it out and Connor immediately said “That’s the game!!!!” I cleaned it top to bottom, worked through the repairs, and rebuilt the CRT. It came back to life looking and sounding like it did in 1996.
Then I made the mistake of playing it.
San Francisco Rush is not a serious racing game and it never tried to be. It is a game about launching a car off the top of a hill in San Francisco, clearing an entire city block in the air, landing on a rooftop, and finding out there was a shortcut up there the whole time. The tracks are stuffed with hidden routes, secret jumps, and shortcuts that feel like bugs the developers decided to keep. You are rewarded for driving badly in interesting ways. The physics are ridiculous. But… the sense of speed holds up 30 years later.
Connor got his game back. I got a new favorite. Everybody won!
3. Aliens (1990)
Konami’s Aliens is the most underrated cabinet on our floor and I will keep saying it.
This game came out in 1990, right in Konami’s absolute prime, the same studio and the same era that gave us the arcade beat-em-ups people still talk about constantly. Aliens got left out of that conversation and it does not deserve to be.
It is a run-and-gun side scroller where you play as Ripley or Hicks fighting your way through the colony. The pacing is excellent. You get open corridors, then tight ambush rooms where facehuggers drop in from everywhere, then boss encounters that force you to change how you are playing. The sprite work is fantastic. The atmosphere actually lands, which is not easy when you are working with 1990 hardware and a horror license.
Best of all, it is a two-player co-op game that genuinely gets better with a partner. Grab somebody, pick your character, and go. Most people who try it once come back.
For our Aliens cabinet, we wrapped it in awesome custom artwork with some great easter eggs!
2. Halo: Fireteam Raven
I recently played Halo: Campaign Evolved, the 2026 remake of Combat Evolved. Going back through that campaign with modern visuals put me right back in 2001, and the second I finished it I walked out onto our floor and started right into Fireteam Raven.
Fireteam Raven is a four-player rail shooter built by Raw Thrills, and it is one of the few licensed arcade games in recent memory that actually respects the source material. You are not playing as Master Chief. You are a UNSC squad running a parallel campaign alongside the events of Combat Evolved, which means you get the same locations, the same enemies, and the same music, all from ground level where you are much more breakable than the guy in green armor.
The presentation is the part people are not ready for. The screen is enormous. Two people can play at once, shoulder to shoulder, and the co-op chaos of a full squad is completely different from playing it solo. The Halo audio design carries straight over, so the weapons sound right, the Covenant sound right, and that soundtrack hits exactly the way it should.
It is a legitimately good addition to the Halo franchise, not a cash-in. That is rare.
1. Stern Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye
Stern released Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye in 2026, and instead of going back to the Michael Bay film well like the 2011 machine did, they built the entire game around the original 1984 G1 cartoon and the 1986 animated movie. That single decision is why this pinball works. It is aimed directly at people who grew up watching this after school, and it does not miss.
The mechanics are what make it a great pinball machine rather than just a great theme. The articulated Megatron toy with the rotating cannon that fires the ball back at you is one of the most impressive mechs Stern has put on a playfield in years. The Soundwave ball lock is fantastic. The Optimus Prime bash target gives you the thing every Transformers fan wants, which is a reason to hit Optimus with a pinball. The layout flows. Shots connect into each other. It rewards you for learning it.
Then there is everything wrapped around the gameplay. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker on the callouts. Actual G1 animation on the display. And “The Touch” by Stan Bush, which means every so often somebody at our arcade gets to have a genuinely emotional moment in front of a pinball machine, and honestly, good for them.
Nostalgia gets a lot of games in the door. Very few of them are also this well designed. This might be the best machine Stern has launched in years, and it is absolutely my number one right now.
Come Build Your Own List
That is where my head is today. Yours will be different, and that is the whole point of an arcade with this much variety under one roof. One flat-rate day pass, everything on the floor, play whatever you want for as long as you want.
Come find your own top 5 at Time Rift Arcade, 2113 Harwood Rd Ste 351 in Bedford.
And if you disagree with my list, tell me. I’m usually around. 🙂
