From Out Run to Wii Sports: The nine greatest summer video games

No need to check the weather forecast for our stroll through decades of sunny seasonal offerings, through Vice City and Xtreme Beach Volleyball

We have such a fraught relationship with summer in Britain. Most of the time, the sun skulks behind cloud cover, only briefly surfacing to give us false hope on the first day of Wimbledon. Its fleeting visits are met with near orgiastic excitement as even we grown adults flock to ice cream vans or hastily erect rusting barbecues so that we can give all our neighbours botulism. No sunny day can be taken for granted, so the result is stress and resentment. You don't want to put a bikini on and frolic in the surf, but you have to or the summer police will come and bang you up.

This is why, unless you can spend three months of the year in Portugal, video games are the best place to revel in sunshine. None of these classics will ever be rained off or require the purchase of a Pack-a-Mac. And if you get bored of the endless cobalt skies, you can just switch off and go outside in the rain. Nobody loses.