Hudson Soft's little known answer to Sega's Shinobi series of games, like said series Hagane focuses on precision based action gaming, giving you access to a sword and kunai's as well as various acrobatic moves. A very well designed game with a whole load of set pieces.

Classic computer strategy game where you take the role of a deity and shape the future of a race of people.

A true benchmark for action games when it arrived, Contra III wowed people with its huge enemies and massively over the top set pieces (riding on a missile whilst shooting a flying space ship?!) These days though, certain aspects haven't aged too well so it lost some places in the list (those top down levels have seen better days)

Includes everything you need from a good scrolling shooter, an excellent and well thought out weapon system, great set pieces with cool bosses (the Ed 209 style boss is especially classy) great graphics effects and brilliant music throughout.

Sequel to the classic 8-bit micro game, thankfully they made the game play far more focused this time and overall its a serious improvement. It takes time to get used to, but when you do what you have here is one of the best puzzle games out there, it plays like Marble Madness with more puzzle and platforming elements.

Actraiser is a hybrid of platformer and strategy games, you spend half the time fighting through the platforming levels and the other half re-building the world in a sim city fashion, both sections are so good on their own that you get the idea that they could've made two separate games out of what they had here!. Everything in the game gels together admirably and the sound track is a first rate job throughout.

After the less than stellar port of the first game Mortal Kombat came back to the SNES in style with this excellent sequel, and it was far better than the original anyway, with a better and refined fighting engine and more interesting characters.

The classic series was brought into the new generation brilliantly with this first 16-bit iteration for SNES. Using the original NES game as its basis, Castlevania IV expanded on all the prior elements of the series whilst also improving on control with the more versatile whip, and adding some amazing set pieces of which really showed off some of the SNES' hardware tricks..

After the lackluster, slowdown ridden Super R-Type, Irem managed to redeem themselves in style with this, unlike its predecessor, R-Type III was designed from the ground up to take advantage of the SNES hardware and it really shows, it has far more action going on as well as numerous graphical effects but this time there's very little slowdown to speak of.

After their fantastic original, Lufia's developers decided to go for a prequel for their next venture to tell the story of the characters met in the beginning of the first game, apart from the story which was as great as ever, the game play was overhauled for the better, incorporating a less random play style and a much more interesting puzzle orientated stance.