I don't remember how I ended up getting a copy of Ecco the Dolphin. I preferred to play stuff that involved lots of punching and kicking, and a game about a lost cetacean searching for his family would have come as a an affront to my then bloodthirsty childhood brain.

However, it became one of my favorite Sega games, representing a welcome change from the instant button-bashing gratification of fucking up punks and bikers in Streets Of Rage 2. The central character is a dolphin, obviously, called Ecco, again, who is estranged from his pod after a mysterious tornado sucks them out of the ocean. It transpires that they've been abducted by a group of aliens known as the Vortex, who come to Earth to harvest its natural resources, including sucking up a smorgasbord of sea life. Ecco's quest takes him to Atlantis, before he travels back in time through a complex combination of wormholes to confront the Vortex at its hive, the Machine.