Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast, 2000)
This puzzle game by Sonic Team was the first European Dreamcast release to offer online play. Sega Europe gave it away for free to encourage players to get online - the game became the standard pack-in with new Dreamcast consoles, while existing owners could fill out a form on Dreamarena to claim their copy.
The single-player puzzle mode gives you a limited number of directional tiles, which must be used to guide your mice safely past the cats and into the rockets. It's possible to create your own puzzles and upload them to the online servers for other players to try.
The multiplayer mode supports up to four players both offline and online, and is much more chaotic. Here, each player can place up to three directional tiles at once in a bid to guide the most mice into their rocket, while keeping the cats at bay. This is complicated not only by other players, but by random roulette effects that swap rocket positions, increase the number of cats or mice, or simply blast lots of players with cats.
Although the official game servers were closed many years ago, dedicated fans restored the game's online functions and it can still be played using the DreamPi today. For more information on how to do that, visit Dreamcast Live.
