Not quite the same eternal classic as OutRun, Super Hang-On is still worthy of inclusion thanks to its sensation of speed and competition; the open road is yours, and the feeling of bearing down on your bike and thrashing the throttle is nearly as satisfying as sliding a Ferrari.

Super Hang-On always comes off second-best next to OutRun – Outride a Crisis is no Splash Wave, the scenarios aren’t as imaginative and it lacks the same “feel good” element. Still, this does Super Hang-On a disservice – it’s a tremendously fast and engaging game, with well-paced stages that always push you right up to the checkpoint. If you pass it in an arcade, favour it with a few credits and you’ll be pleased. Miles better than Manx TT too.

Roll your Super Monkey Ball through a maze to the goal gate, collecting bananas. Odd, but wonderfully simple. The arcade levels are tantalising platforms for precision movement, with the slightest of errors summoning the foulest of curses from players as AiAi dies for the fortieth time. The guitar stage on the original game still gives me nightmares. 

Far, far better than the one player mode though are the party and minigame modes – Target, Race, Golf, Billiards and Bowling are all good, but my favourite is the sheer chaos of Monkey Fight, where four grumpy gorillas with boxing gloves scramble for power-ups including the all-conquering Vortex Punch. Not many people like playing me at this, which probably explains why I’m so fond of it. It’s a shame the multiplayer games on Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz aren’t quite as good, as in their original form they make Super Monkey Ball easily as much fun as any game on the list.

Such a huge improvement over the original that it rendered the original Virtua Fighter obsolete. The most obvious and welcome improvement was the presentation of the characters – now texture-mapped, totally solid creations, they became distinctive personalities in their own right.

The two new characters, Shun-Di and Lion Rafale, brought two unique fighting styles that helped move Virtua Fighter 2 away from conventional fighting games into its own groove. Although not as tactical (or float-based) as VF4 and VF5, the seeds were sown for the series’ future – Lion and Shun had dodge moves, counter-attacks were introduced and, in the arcade, Wolf’s cage let you trap your opponent for merciless damage.

I remember when I first got my Saturn I wanted to put together a really slick-looking video highlighting the best Saturn games around, and part of that involved an extremely scripted match of Virtua Fighter 2 between Akira and Pai. I had each move planned out and it would have been ace if I were good enough to make it look natural. In the end I just decided we should fight properly, which looked much better!

At the time I found VF2 pretty harsh; unlike VF4, I never really developed any finesse or technique. It certainly looked and sounded tremendous, and the Saturn conversion was an incredible technical achievement, but in hindsight Virtua Fighter 2 was really the true starting point for what became the greatest fighting series in the world.