With the news of The Riverside Tavern, Clarence Place, Newport, being taken over by new owners, Niche Hospitality Group , and the addition of arcade machines and a gaming area featuring consoles from years gone by, it got me thinking about which games would be best to have for you to play with your friends at such a place.

Now, usually when it comes to videogames, to make a really good one you must get the balance of gameplay and story just right to make the experience of playing it the best it can be.

However, I think that with games that have been specifically made with multiplayer in mind (and I’m talking local multiplayer, none of that new-fangled online malarkey), the gameplay aspect has to be the main focus.

A good game to challenge your friends at, is more often than not fast paced and exciting as to make it really feel like a competition.

A perfect example being Street Fighter, a game where fights only last about a minute, if that, but they are so frantic and energetic and it works amazingly well as a game to compete with your friends at. And although, yes, the game does have quite a lot of backstory, you definitely do not need to know any of it to enjoy the experience of firing a hadouken into your friends face (virtually, of course. That sort of behaviour is likely looked down on in the real world).

Anyway, I feel like I have explained the situation well, so I shall begin talking about videogames that I feel would work perfectly in this sort of environment.

First of all, as I have more or less said already, literally any fighter game in the style of Street Fighter or Tekken. This is simply because they can adhere to gamers of any skill.

You could theoretically pick up the controller having never played any game before in your life and hit all the buttons wildly and still end up the victor. That is, of course, unless you have to play your one friend that has memorised all of the combos and completely destroys you in a matter of seconds (you know who you are).

But that fact is, games like this are such a good choice for some videogame related fun with your friends and I would be very surprised if I didn’t see a game like this appear in the refurbished Riverside Sports Bar and Kitchen (that’s it’s new name).

Sports games are always fun to play with your friends, most notably football games like FIFA and PES. Whilst you can’t necessarily get away with madly hitting all the buttons in the hope of beating your opponent, if you know how the game is played, it’s always fun to try to use your skills to win 11-0 against Real Madrid with the mighty Newport County. With ‘Sports Bar’ being in the name of the place, again, I would be surprised if a football game wasn’t part of the selection on offer.

Now of course there had to be some form of first-person shooter on this list, and that is with good reason.

I would choose Call of Duty Black Ops as it not only has the 4-way split screen deathmatch mode with CPU bots, but it also has (in my opinion) the best Nazi zombies maps on any of the Call of Duty games.

This is slightly different to the other two in that, you are not fighting against your friends, you are fighting with them instead. I think things like this are part of the definitive co-op collection because you get more into it the further it goes on and the intensity increase as you do also.

This is definitely one of the first games that enters my mind whenever I’m thinking of games to play with my friends, and I think it’s the one you can play for the longest without getting too bored or annoyed.

In addition to all of these, there has also got to be a selection of arcade style, multiplayer games like Pacman, Time Crisis and my all-time favourite: Sega Rally. I know that these take up quite a large amount of space and I am not expecting Riverside to take these in by any means. But oh man, it would be awesome if they did.

Riverside Sports Bar and Kitchen is planned to be fully refurbished, videogames and all, in early 2017. I for one eagerly await the full, official opening and I think that quite a few others will feel the same too.