Never before has so much charm been infused into so few pixels. From the outset Worms is a simple strategy game, you command a team of four and take turns in choosing and using a selection of different weapons each of which are useful for different situations. But the randomness of the terrain design, coupled with its destructibility and the diversity of the weapons lends a copious amount of on the spot strategic planning to the proceedings, making it one of the best, and deepest multiplayer games in videogame history.

Guardian Heroes is effectively a Final Fight clone with some minor rpg elements thrown into the mix, but Treasure did a very good job at increasing longevity by adding some important new features, branching pathways coupled with collectable characters (for use in the fun, but lightweight 6 player versus mode). These additions make the gameplay a touch more interesting, and create a real incentive to play through multiple times.

Even to this day many people seem to think of the Darkstalkers series as simply Street Fighter with monsters. Certainly at first the most easily apparent difference between the two series' is the graphics, with fantastic, wacky, and generally over the top character designs and artwork being the style of Darkstalkers, but dig deeper and you find a number of gameplay elements which, whilst not causing the game to stray too far from the SF template, help to give it a feel of its own. Firstly the super gauge works very differently here, working more as a modifier of the special moves, and there's original elements such as dashes, and follow up attacks (jump on people when they're down), all of which increase the pacing in comparison to Street Fighter.

A brilliant fighting game from Sega, Virtual On has you dashing around in the fully 3D world firing off barrages of shots, taking cover behind objects, and rushing in close for melee attacks. For a 5th generation 3D action game it all works unexpectedly fast and smooth, and is a very unique and exciting experience, even the two player split screen mode works very well. Definitely one of the 3D Saturn games fans at the time could be proud of.

Often referred to as the first bullet hell shooter due to its use of elaborate bullet patterns and small ship hit boxes, Batsugun comes from Toaplan, the same company that made the excellent Fire Shark, Truxton, and Hellfire for 16-bit. Gameplay wise it fits somewhere between older, traditional vertical scrollers, and later bullet hell games like DoDonPachi, it also uses an interesting weapon system that involves gaining experience points through as you destroy the enemies throughout the levels.

Mega Man X4 doesn't do anything hugely different to its forebears, but when the core gameplay is this good who cares? Capcom carried on with their excellent, action packed Mega Man platforming and shooting action, coupled with the newer adventuring aspects added to the SNES games, and improved the graphics and sound for the 32-Bit generation. The level designs here are as good as ever before, and its all just very playable and addictive.

If any game is responsible for defining the real time strategy genre it has to be Command and Conquer, it perfectly expanded on its predecessor, Dune II, and really helped to popularise the genre. In the game you mine raw materials and create buildings, each of which give you access to more options and allow you to build up more units, it all very compulsive stuff, and the Saturn port, whilst not perfect without a mouse, still works very well.

Holy Ark is the direct sequel to the Mega Drive game Shining in the Darkness, and it represents a very different sort of JRPG to what was commonly seen during the 5th generation. Like its predecessor the majority of the game is played with a 1st person view, you walk around the towns and dungeons as though you yourself are the character, with your party appearing onscreen and turning to face you when they converse. Gameplay includes the usual stat based menus you'd expect, but there's also more emphasis on solving proper, well thought out puzzles, many of which require careful planning, and this is actually the area where Holy Art is most successful, because even if you removed everything else you'd still be left with solid gameplay, which is more than can be said for some JRPG's out there.

This has to be one of the fastest, most action packed 3D games from the entire generation on any system. The gameplay has you running around huge buildings putting out fires and rescuing people, but its the fast pacing, agile moveset, and impressive boss fights which really stand out to create an adrenaline pumping experience. The game would've scored higher but there's a few points that hold it back somewhat, the game is very short at only 4 levels (though extra replay value is included by the level layout changing) and the graphics can be very ropey at times, however, thankfully these complaints don't go too far in souring the overall experience.

This was the port nobody expected the Saturn to manage, but famed Saturn developers Lobotomy, the group who had cut their teeth with the impressive Saturn FPS Powerslave, and proved time and again their programming skills (bet on them making a few more appearances later in this list) managed to pull it off with consummate skill. Quake is a very grim, very atmospheric take on the Doom style corridor shooter, its pretty violent for its time, and is packed full of the sort of secrets which made Doom so fun to explore. As mentioned earlier the Saturn port plays and looks very good, its a little grainier than the PC version, and the frame rate dips at times, but overall its certainly a very respectable version of the game.