Maybe it's just me not seeing a lot of conversation, but it seems to me there's an age of arcade games that gets largely passed over when people discuss games. You have the arcade collector/restoration scene who love the late '70s/early '80s stuff, the younger generation that starts with games from about 1989 (TMNT) through Golden Tee, and you've got them MAME guys who play anything they can download. What seems to be missing is love for the games of the late '80s, especially from 1985-88.
It's that era where 16-bit graphics started to rear their heads, and games began shifting from just high score play to completion being a component of the design. It's crazy to me to see stuff like Black Tiger, Time Soldiers, Rastan, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, R-Type, Sky Soldiers, Heavy Barrel, etc. remembered fondly as console games or not at all, and not desireable to the arcade collector scene. You'll find more people ready to talk Space Zap or Mad Planets or Juno First than these late '80s action games, and it it wasn't a Nintendo cabinet, nobody seems to care. It's like the world skipped from Frogger to Neo Geo retroactively.
I don't care about value of the games monetarily in this case; I'm just perplexed by what I see as a pervasive lack of interest in an amazing transitional period that defined the console style of the early '90s. Is there something I'm missing, or some community out there I just haven't found yet? I want to talk to people more interested in SNK, Capcom, and Konami than Rockola and Williams. Any thoughts? Places I could find good conversation to duck in on?