Sega Saturn's top five games

Sega's 32-bit machine was unfortunately crushed by Sony's firstborn, but that hardly means that there weren't dozens of fantastic games released for the Saturn.

5. Virtua Fighter 2

On November 30, 1995, no other fighting game for any other console could even dream of rivalling the Saturn version of Yu Suzuki's incomparable sequel. The animations were so realistic, so smoothly fluid, and the fighting so strategically and cleverly organised that button mashing, as found in Tekken (for example), was punished rather than rewarded.

4. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei

There are relatively few big, expensive Sega action games in history that seem more remarkable than the German-named Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, released for the Saturn in the spring of 1996. This prologue to the first game gave us the chance to more thoughtfully and rewardingly control Lundi/Lagi, and everything from the enchantingly beautiful design to the bombastic music made this one of the console's finest titles.

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3. Sega Rally Championship

Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally Championship... Sega, as we all know, is behind some of the most brilliant and successful arcade conversions ever released and the home version for the Saturn of their hyper-popular arcade classic, was one such game that truly enchanted.

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2. Athlete Kings

Track & Field II and Sega's painfully underrated London 2012 - The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games are two great Olympic games, but neither could ever match Athlete Kings (Decathlete in Japan), because it was the best. The single best Olympics game of all-time was developed by Sega themselves and is actually still just as entertaining. It had brilliant design, brilliant humour, and brilliant game mechanics, all of which made this a winner of the coveted Olympic gold.

1. Nights: Into Dreams

Sonic the Hedgehog creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima had an idea after completing Sonic & Knuckles for a platform game in the same vein where the hero could fly. After several different concepts were developed, they agreed that Nights was the way to go, and the rest, as we all know, is history. Nights had small fragments of the mysticism found in the first Sonic game, but it was weirder, less understandable, and thus more original. It was atmospheric like nothing else for Sega's 32-bit machine, gorgeous and offered absolutely brilliant game mechanics that quickly became addictive.