When I opened up internetarcade, I have to say I wasn't quite expecting games like this. I was thinking of NES classics rather than arcade, and realized real quick that I had little knowledge in the arcade genre.
I played a few games and found myself liking Two Tigers a lot. You play as the smaller purple and blue plane, dropping bombs and shooting down enemy planes in order to sink ships. I've had experience playing on emulators before, and I now remember why I stopped playing on them. No matter what, the gameplay is catered to the controller of the original counsel, or in this case the arcade machine. Some of the other games on the site were almost unplayable with how it had been remapped to a keyboard.
Two Tigers by itself though is a fun experience. Your penalty is if you don't take down enough ships rather than dying three or so times. I found this a lot less stressful. You could even use the infinite life mechanic to your advantage to crash other planes into the ship. But the time lost in respawning doesn't make this a good strategy. I found it best to stay in the middle, shooting constantly and dropping bombs as much as I could. The plane you control doesn't drop a bomb until the one you just launched hits it's mark, so the closer you are to the bottom of the screen the better. The one thing that drove me nuts though was how the left canon on the ship would almost always get a hit on your plane when you respawn.
Adjusting to the controls is a bit of a doozy, but its definitely worth looking into the archive should one want to see an important step in gaming history.
https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
