Not only the best Jaguar game ever, but almost certainly the best video game ever full stop. Not so much a game, in fact, as an all-out Stalingrad-scale assault on your senses, mixing eye-watering graphical fireworks and the first video game sound you'd ever want to listen to on its own with gameplay that'll have your heart pumping so hard and so fast that you'll think there's a hyperactive Brazilian samba band hiding inside your ribcage.

How good is it? When Tempest 2000 came out, I spent £285 buying a copy of the game and an imported US Jaguar to play it on. That's how good. The last time I looked in my local second-hand game shop, they were flogging copies without instructions (what, you need instructions?) for £6. That's SIX pounds. (And given the price of Jags these days, you could probably buy the game now AND the machine to run it on for about 10 quid more than a copy of Saturn Virtua Cop). Even His Majesty Pete The Third, King Of The Stupid People, has bought Tempest 2000. Have you any idea what you're missing out on if you don't?

2. DOOM

You really shouldn't need us to tell you about Doom by now. But it's worth pointing out one last time that Jaguar Doom is still the best incarnation of the game seen on any format to date. Tweaked, improved and new levels run as quickly and smoothly as all but the fastest £1600's-worth of PC can muster - and certainly as fast as you could ever need - while the much-maligned (and rightly so) Jaguar pad makes a far better job of the controls than you'd ever have expected. The game itself (alright, you talked us into it) is a cast-iron blood-and-guts classic that's still more than a match for the countless clones that have sprung up in its wake, and the awesome network Deathmatch option is the icing on a cake that's already of hiding-three-strippers-and-a-donkey-inside-it proportions.

3. IRON SOLDIER

One of the outstanding reasons to buy a Jaguar (and sadly, also one of the major drawbacks) is that it exists in a little separate world of its own when it comes to games. Most cross-format titles don't make it onto the Jag, but by the same token, the Jag is blessed with a whole slew of original games that can't be played on any other console. Wolfenstein 3D, Alien vs Predator, Cybermorph and, of course, Tempest 2000 all fall into this latter category, and so does Iron Soldier (phew). At heart a simple shoot-'em-up, Iron Soldier nonetheless has a feel all of its own, putting you as it does in control of a huge robot the size of a ten-storey building, with a less original but no less enjoyable mission to obliterate everything in sight. Clomping around looking down at the view between your huge robot feet as you stomp all over tanks and small family homes is uniquely entertaining, and you can begin to see why King Kong felt the way he did.

4. WOLFENSTEIN 3D

Largely (and wrongly) ignored since Doom appeared on the scene, Wolfenstein 3D is worthy of attention for more than just being Doom's daddy. A cleaner, simpler game than its offspring, Wolfenstein packs in the maximum amount of senseless carnage with the minimum amount of distracting puzzle-solving and comes up with a highly evocative game (it's nice to take on something approaching a real-life enemy for once, and slaughtering Nazis is endlessly rewarding. In real life, too) that's rather less claustrophobically scary than the illustrious follow-up. And also, the graphics are much crisper and don't make your eyes go funny and your head hurt after you've been playing it for four hours non-stop. Which is always a boon, I find.

5. ALIEN vs PREDATOR

Gameplay-wise this doesn't match up to either Doom or Wolfenstein (obviously, or it wouldn't be below them in the chart. What are you, stupid or something?), but what it lacks in cunning design it very nearly manages to make up for in atmosphere. I've played a hundred Doom games, but rounding a corner in AvP to encounter one of those hideous eyeless Aliens scampering at you in that trademark way is more frightening than anything else you've ever seen in a game. In real life too, probably. And I still have to turn away from the screen whenever one of my Colonial Marines cops it from a face-hugger. Honestly. Also, the three different games you can play (as an Alien, as the Predator, or as the aforementioned Colonial Marine), are actually different enough to feel like different games, and if you can't find one you like then you're just not trying hard enough.

6. SYNDICATE

And if you're talking about atmosphere, sooner or later you're going to be talking about Syndicate. Set in an all-too-plausible near future where the world is run by sinister megaglobal corporations not unlike the one that publishes this very magazine, Syndicate sets you at the head of a team of four heavily-tooled-up cyborgs armed with a device known as the Persuadatron (ulp), with which you can brainwash other game characters into following your evil will. And if that doesn't work, just blow their heads off with a rocket launcher. The Jag gets the original, fully-sinister Amiga/PC version too, rather than the kiddied-up one seen on other consoles, and if you're not scared after playing Doom, AvP and this, then you're probably a cyborg already.

7. THEME PARK

The games so far released for the Jaguar have been, in many ways, a bit of a throwback to the old days of games consoles. Shallow arcade-type titles have been very much to the fore, with little of the strategy/RPG/puzzle/weird Japanese stuff seen on other machines. Or the good platform games. But anyway. That's not necessarily a bad thing - decent arcade games have been in short supply in recent times, and they're what made so many people get into games in the first place - but it's nice all the same to have a bit of a break and play something like Theme Park. One of the best examples of the god-sim genre started off by Sim City all those years ago, Theme Park puts the fun back into building up a simulated business, but without losing any of the demanding strategy. Even though it's number one in a category of one at the moment, it's going to be a long time before something comes along to topple it.

8. CYBERMORPH

It was never going to be the kind of killer application that sold the machine on its own, but this is still a much-underrated little game. Eerie, unearthly graphics make for a really otherworldly atmosphere, backed up by lovely whooshy effects and that dreamy voice-of-your-ship speech, but the game is still the star. In fact, in many ways Cybermorph is the uncredited ancestor of Bullfrog's much-feted Magic Carpet, taking that game's mix of exploration and all-out blasting and putting them into a much more engaging setting. The difficulty curve is just right too, ramping smoothly but unmistakeably up from gentle introductory levels to terrifying firefights that'll take every ounce of skill you can muster, and the scenery varies enough from level to level to keep you interested. And if you don't get it free when you buy the machine, the going rate for second-hand copies of Cybermorph is around £3, so you'd need to be a bit dim to be without it.

9. CANNON FODDER

In many ways reminiscent of Syndicate, this undisputed classic from Sensible Software is a much more straightforward arcade shoot-'em-up, only with some of the most fiendishly-constructed levels you've ever seen. The graphics have been significantly prettied-up for the Jag without losing any of the much-loved tiny-figures Sensible style, and while the joypad doesn't make for perfect control, the gameplay is so entertaining and just plain gosh-darned lovable that you really won't mind persisting with the controls for the short while it'll take you to get to grips with them properly. Shooting your own wounded comrades to put them out of their misery has never been so much fun.

10. PINBALL FANTASIES