Welcome to MAME Rankings

This is the current home of rankings.ini, a MAMEUI support file that categorizes all original MAME games according to how much FUN they are to play. This file was created for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I felt it helps people have more fun with MAME. It's a bit daunting sifting through 7000+ games in MAME trying to find something fun. Hopefully this will make the task easier! Just download the .ini file and drop it into your "./folders" directory underneath the MAMEUI parent. Latest update: 0.127 Games are ranked as follows: 0 (Not Working): The game doesn't work at all. Note that this includes all games marked as "GAME_NOT_WORKING" in MAME; but is not limited to them. This is because I believe there are several games that should have the "GAME_NOT_WORKING" flag set but for whatever reason (oversight, most likely) they do not. 10 or 20 (Terrible): The game is utter garbage and really not worth playing at all. 30 or 40 (Poor): The game play is not good, the frame rate, colors, responsiveness may be substandard, or the game itself may be a bad rip-off of another, original game. 50 or 60 (Average): The game doesn't feature anything particular interesting or unique, though it may be worth playing every once in a while. 70 or 80 (Good): The game is definitely worth playing but falls short in some areas. 90 or 100 (Great): The best stuff is here. This includes all games considered "classics" but also includes games that are just a whole lot of fun to play. A few notes regarding this file: I only rank original MAME games. This means all clones are out. The only exceptions are games that only have working clones; in these cases, the parent is ranked as "0 (Not Working)" and the clone is ranked in accordance with its quality. The rankings above are based purely on how "fun" a game is, rather than other factors. Joust doesn't look like much by today's standards, but I challenge anyone to come up with a modern game that's more fun to play! One exception to this rule: games that rely on knowledge of Japanese (of which I have none) such as mahjong and quiz games. I was forced to rank these games based on qualities such as graphics and animation rather than gameplay. I'm not going to pretend my ranking system isn't controversial - it is. For example, I'm sure many fans of the "bronze" era of arcade gaming (circa 1971-1978) will feel slighted since many of these games are ranked pretty low. But hey - that's the way I feel about them. IMHO, video gaming didn't really start getting fun until Space Invaders. Really. Your opinion counts! If you feel that a particular game deserves a higher/lower score (and no doubt, you will), feel free email me. Heck, you may not even get scorned! :p Enjoy! Shoegazer Return to NonMAME.