Top 7 Games Within Games

Over the years there have been many games within games: little diamonds of retro joy hidden away, tucked in the most obscure places, just waiting to be unearthed and played. In this week's Top 7 we take a look at some of the most enjoyable and addictive games that can be found inside other games.

Shenmue - Hang On & Space Harrier

{Shenmue} (and Shenmue II) was an incredibly ambitious game. Costing a small fortune to produce, legendary designer Yu Suzuki tried to make a world teaming with life, one that felt genuinely immersive. The game blended different ideas together, and the result captured the hearts and minds of millions of gamers.

Yu Suzuki, it so happened, also worked on many of the classic Sega arcade games of yesteryear, and two of them went on to feature in Shenmue as fully playable experiences. Hang On and {Space Harrier}, two incredibly addictive arcade games, can be found in the first game (with full cabinet treatment), and OutRun went on to feature in Shenmue II.

Shenmue let us play two of Yu Suzuki's early arcade classics.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Fishing (and other RPG mini games)

What could be more engaging than assuming the role of Hylian adventurer and traveling back through time to awaken sages so as to imprison an evil king hell bent on the causing all sorts of ill-advised mischief? Fishing, that's what.

For some reason, fishing in Zelda was incredibly popular.

Many an hour has been wasted away on the mini-game found within Ocarina of Time, with the aim of the game to, yep you guessed it, catch the biggest fish in the lake. That something so simple could distract so many from something so epic is astounding.

You can mention many other RPGs in the same breath. Notable examples are Pazaak in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Snowboarding in Final Fantasy, any of the crappy jobs in {Fable II}. The list goes on and on.

You can still play Pazaak online if you want.

Project Gotham Racing 2 - Geometry Wars

Not two games you would normally put together, but perhaps that juxtaposition was one of the reasons why Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing 2 worked so well.

One was a slick racer, full of drift and kudos, and the other an eye melting arcade shooter that has the potential to hurt the brain as much as it does the thumbs. Both were fiendishly playable, with Geometry Wars being so much so, that it was released as a standalone game on Xbox Live Arcade.

Geometry Wars has come along way since it first appeared in Project Gotham Racing 2.
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World of Warcraft - Peggle

There aren't many games out there more addictive than {World of Warcraft}. {Peggle} could well be one of them.

The MMORPG from Blizzard has done many things over the years to induce us to stay longer on their servers, but not many of their moves were as clever as introducing Peggle as an in-game experience. But it was a move that made sense, and the fusion of luck and skill that makes Peggle so moreish sits perfectly in the equally compulsive world of World of Warcraft.

Peggle is mostly about luck, but skill still helps a little.

Day of the Tentacle - Maniac Mansion

A classic in a classic. LucasArts opened up their superlative adventure Day of the Tentacle with the option to first play the game that inspired it so much, Maniac Mansion. All you had to do, if memory serves (it was a long time ago), was walk into one of the connecting rooms and activate the old DOS computer sitting on the desk. From that terminal the entirety of Maniac Mansion was available to be played.

Ron Gilbert was the brains behind Maniac Mansion, in fact it was his first game for Lucasarts. But it was years later, when many of the ideas he first established in his inaugural game had gone on to be industry mainstays, that Day of the Tentacle came along and wowed gamers (some maintain that there's never been a better, or at the very least funnier, adventure game made).

Day of the Tentacle: perhaps the funniest game written by either humans or tentacles.

Duke Nukem 3D - Death Tank Zwei

{Duke Nukem 3D} is a game that holds a special place in the heart of many a gamer. This is because of a multitude of reasons, and most of them revolve around lewd humour and brash one-liners. But buried deep within the (Saturn version of the) game was another treat that will be fondly remembered.

{Death Tank} was a simple game, where players would control a tank and move it around a pixelated 2D landscape, firing off missiles at their various opponents, trying to take them down before the landscape flattened at it became a free-for-all. It does everything that {Worms} does (although Worms is much more playful with its application of violence), and although entirely simplistic, it was incredibly playable.

Death Tank recently got reworked for Xbox Live, but the premise is entirely the same.

Grand Theft Auto IV - QUB3D

There are plenty of ways to amuse yourself in Liberty City. You can follow the main story line, steal cars, go vigilante, or just drive around taking in the atmosphere (whilst listening to the radio, of course). But there is also an arcade game in there too. Situated in several locations across the city is an arcade game called QUB3D, a fusion of Tetris and Columns that caught the attention of anyone who stayed still long enough to try it out.

There was a high score on the game, and beating it unlocked an achievement, meaning anyone wanting the achievement for 100% completion had to beat that score.

QUB3D is the lovechild of Tetris and a slinky.