Final Fight was awesome, I too spent large sums of money on that as a kid.

It's on PSN now.. picked it up, have had a blast playing it with the same friend I used to play it with in the arcades 20 years ago :).

Hmmm, spent loads of time playing Mr Wardner without getting very far.

Really enjoyed Mr Do.

Favourite I guess is Bubble Bobble

During the late 80s:

John Elway Quarterback
Simpsons
TMNT
Golden Axe
Dead Alley
Gauntlet
Double Dragon
Vigilante
Yie Ar Kung Fu
Rush 'n' Attack
Championship Wrestling
Rastan
X-Men

90s:
Dungeons and Dragons
Rastan II
Killer Instinct
Magic Tower
Knights of the Round
King of Dragons
Street Fighter II-Turbo
Mortal Kombat
Time Crisis
House of the Dead
Lethal Enforcers
Tekken Tag Tournament
Dark Stalkers

Technically, I'm old enough to remember the golden age of arcade gaming, but tbh, Pac Man, Space Invaders, Defender, Donkey Kong, etc, didn't hold my attention as well as the flashier properties that came along in the mid to late eighties.

Not to mention, I always strongly preferred major co-op matches in Golden Axe, Gauntlet, etc, with my friends, brothers, etc.

and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q*bert]Q*bert. It got to the point where I had to ask permission to play those games from the arcade owner, since I could play them for hours on a single quarter.

Interestingly, looking at the official high score on Pengo (1,110,370 points), I think I may have actually beaten it in my time playing it. If memory serves, I think the high score display on the game warps around to zero after you hit around 600,000 points. I could be mistaken on that last, but I do know I scored over 1 million points on the game more than a few times.

Two more games I had to ask permission to play were pinball games:

The Black Hole
The Black Knight

I loved pinball and those two were my favourites back then because I could play the crap out of them on a single quarter.

Ah, good times.