ChuChu Rocket!

Few games pair an adorable look with such merciless chaos as ChuChu Rocket! from Sonic Team. This brisk puzzle from 1999 sets you a seemingly simple task: use directional arrows to guide swarms of mice into rockets while protecting them from cats, which move across the same grid with bloodthirsty simplicity.

In the single-player part it's a clever logic game where you place a limited number of arrows so the mice find their way to the goal and the cats end up out of the picture. The solutions require foresight and an understanding of how all the little creatures move across the board at once. It's an elegant, gradually tangling puzzle that rewards careful thinking about every move.

But ChuChu Rocket became legendary thanks to its multiplayer. With four players, the tranquil puzzle turns into a frenzied battle where you sabotage each other, steal one another's mice and turn your opponents' own arrows against them. The pace is merciless and the winner changes within seconds – it's exactly the kind of game that provokes both laughter and shouting in a single room.

The title also holds extraordinary historical significance. The Dreamcast was the first console with a built-in modem, and ChuChu Rocket! went down as one of the first online-playable console games in Europe. At a time when networked play on consoles was still exotic, it was a small technological miracle and proof that Sega meant the future seriously.

Thanks to the combination of an accessible look, a clever single-player and insane multiplayer, ChuChu Rocket! remains one of the most beloved and most fondly remembered pieces in the Dreamcast library – a game that can still entertain to this day.

Why play it: An adorable but merciless puzzle with legendarily chaotic multiplayer and a place in history as one of the first online console games in Europe.