Without further ado, we introduce the second part of our Games of the Millennium feature...

Tomb Raider - arcade adventure (Core Design)
Picture the scene. Core Design - a solid, if occasionally workmanlike UK development team - announce their new game. Called Tomb Raider, it's a 3D platform adventure starring a woman named Lara Croft. Being around at the time, the Future Gamer team remember that people didn't quite know what to expect, and then the game arrived at magazine offices. "This is amazing!" was the cry. And it was, and it is. In a sense, Tomb Raider is just as influential as Mario 64. And if you want to fight about that statement, we'll see you in the Forum later...

Smash Tennis - tennis sim (Namco)
Be it on the SNES or PlayStation, the Smash Tennis series has barely evolved at all over the years. And there's a good reason for that - as a multiplayer game, it's pretty much perfect as it is. You could say that it owes more to Pong than its real-life subject matter, and you'd probably be right. But that is its strength: its elementary nature engenders fast, instinctive play.

Super Bomberman - puzzle game (Hudsonsoft)
As a one-player game, Super Bomberman is an inoffensive but eminently forgettable experience. With the addition of a Multi Tap and a crowd of pad-bearing drunks, slackers or couch potatoes, it becomes arguably the most addictive game known to man. Many have tried to beat it; few have even come close. Even Hudsonsoft themselves appear unable to refurbish Bomberman for the late '90s.

Defender - shoot 'em up (Williams)
Scrolling used to be such an issue. Once upon a time, the simple act of moving one set of graphics from one extreme of the screen to another made gaming hardware sweat. Defender, however, achieved such a feat with ease and became the most fondly remembered shoot 'em up of an era. It's easy to underestimate, however, just how stylised and almost glamorous it was in its day.

Donkey Kong - platform game (Shigeru Miyamoto/Nintendo)
Just as the Hays code once placed shackles on the movie industry's practitioners, would Miyamoto, gifted with greater processing power at the time, have created Donkey Kong? Somehow, Nintendo's brightest design star pushed the limited technology at his disposal to create one of the most distinctive, cogent games ever created. The skill and insight it demonstrates is almost frightening.