Ah, gotcha. Well, so, for Metal Slug in particular, I’m pretty sure that there’s Metal Slug releases on Steam.

Yeah.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=metal+slug

If you’re wondering about a Steam game, you can check ProtonDB to see comments from Linux users as to any compatibility issues.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=metal+slug

The Steam installer is in Ubuntu. So install that, run it, and stuff in Steam should be available.

For MAME, I can’t personally recommend a frontend. MAME iteself is already packaged in Ubuntu. You’re going to need the ROM files, which are floating around out there on the Internet (probably something like mslug.zip, mslug2.zip, etc, and there will probably be some dependent ROMs for the system in question. checks Probably called neogeo.zip, the system ROMs, since it’s a Neo-Geo game. On my system, the roms are stored in ~/.mame/roms (the tilde representing one’s home directory, if you’re not familiar with the convention).

RetroArch is also an “emulate many different types of hardware” emulator in Ubuntu, and you might consider it to be more-approachable; it can apparently also act as a frontend for MAME, though I haven’t used it as such.

For games kind of like Metal Slug…hmm. I haven’t really played much in that line recently, though they used to be popular in the 1990s. These recommendations are gonna be pretty old, but I guess side-view platformer shooters, like Contra. Bionic Commando. You could probably emulate these, and I’d guess that they’ve likely also seen Steam releases. I’m wildly out of date when it comes to current games in the genre, though. “Metroidvania” games might fit this too; they tend to be a more-slow-paced genre, with backtracking and traveling all around a large map while a character gains abilities and powers, but they do the side-view shooter thing, but they have the platforming and shooting aspect. Those have seen a lot more development in recent years.

Older Contra games:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018020/Contra_Anniversary_Collection/

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1628%2C5379&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

There’s a list of Metroidvania 2D platformers on Steam sorted by user reviews; I’ve generally found Steam review score to be pretty accurate as to how much I like a game (though there are a few exceptions). I…actually own a copy of Rain World, though I haven’t played it, but that should run on your system and I’ve seen a lot of people praise it, and it’s highly-rated there. It is considered to be difficult (which arcade Metal Slug games aren’t, if you throw enough quarters at them).

I haven’t played Captain Commando or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but both look like isometric beat-em-ups. I haven’t played anything there in a long time either; I think the last game in the genre I played was probably the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, from something like the 1990s, when they were a popular genre in the arcades. Here’s a list of Steam beat-em-ups sorted by user review, though:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4158&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That’ll mention the release year, and I’d guess that anything aside from new, 3D-perspective games would be fine.

In general, fast-paced, drop-in-and-play type games have a genre — albeit a very broad one, “Arcade”, and while my experience has been that it’s something of a grab-bag for a lot of different types of games.

Here’s a bunch of Steam “Arcade”-tagged games sorted by user reviews.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1773&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

On that list, of the games near the top, I can say that I enjoyed HoloCure and Vampire Survivors, which are in a fairly young genre of video games kicked off by Vampire Survivors — games where the main character keeps automatically-attacking and getting increasingly powerful while increasingly-powerful waves of enemies come at them. Geometry Arena. Nova Drift, which is kind of a modern take on Asteroids. Both of those have one guiding a ship around the screen dodging attacks and shooting back; they shouldn’t be particularly graphically-intensive, don’t require much from 3D hardware.

EDIT: You don’t mention them, but shmups were also popular in the arcade (maybe a little prior to the era with the games you mentioned). These have a constantly-vertically or horizontally-scrolling level with a little spaceship that shoots enormous amounts of firepower at enemies. In recent years, “bullet hell” shmups have become more-popular, which tend to have extremely large numbers of projectiles on the screen at once; not quite my cup of tea, but many people like those. Shmups have remained a genre that is very gentle in terms of hardware requirements. We have a dedicated shmups community on the Threadiverse, !shmups@lemmus.org, so if you have specific interests, they might give better recommendations.

EDIT2: Nova Drift lists Intel HD 4000 as their minimum system requirement, so I might want to forego that or be prepared to return it if it doesn’t start; I don’t know if it’ll run. Intel HD 4000 looks like it supports DirectX 11.1, and Intel HD 2500 apparently does 10-point-something in terms of hardware functionality.