I have a huge soft spot for Capcom's Strider (Arcade, 1989) to the point that I have an actual PCB. Wildly ambitious in terms of design and worldbuilding...and incredibly janky. Also, it has a co-opted soviet council turn into a giant mecha-centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. Notably influential within Capcom's own devteams, having characters who influenced Street Fighter II's Chun-Li and Mega Man X's Vile.
Also fitting the bill more directly, we have Wolfteam's Earnest Evans (Sega Mega Drive/Mega CD, 1991). A lot of 16 bit games successfully played with segmented characters for an early form of skeletal animation - like a lot of well respected classics like Alien Soldier and Contra: Hard Corps - but Wolfteam tried to take things a step further with a entire platformer where the main character has sophisticated ragdoll physics. The end result isn't very playable, but it's pretty impressive for a platform that can't do hardware rotation effects. Also one of the all-time funniest speedruns imo.
I have a huge soft spot for Capcom's Strider (Arcade, 1989) to the point that I have an actual PCB. Wildly ambitious in terms of design and worldbuilding...and incredibly janky. Also, it has a co-opted soviet council turn into a giant mecha-centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. Notably influential within Capcom's own devteams, having characters who influenced Street Fighter II's Chun-Li and Mega Man X's Vile.
Also fitting the bill more directly, we have Wolfteam's Earnest Evans (Sega Mega Drive/Mega CD, 1991). A lot of 16 bit games successfully played with segmented characters for an early form of skeletal animation - like a lot of well respected classics like Alien Soldier and Contra: Hard Corps - but Wolfteam tried to take things a step further with a entire platformer where the main character has sophisticated ragdoll physics. The end result isn't very playable, but it's pretty impressive for a platform that can't do hardware rotation effects. Also one of the all-time funniest speedruns imo.
That’s ridiculous that they tried to get rag doll physics working on 16 but lots of respect for the attempt.
I’m definitely going to emulate strider at some point for the mecha council
Ernest movin’ like a treasure boss