Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
Vectorman for Sega Genesis is one of my favorite games on the console but whenever it’s brought up it is almost exclusively known as just another obscure mascot platformer and it’s even been declared a knockoff of DKC just because both use pre rendered graphics. The sequel is also good.
The graphics still really stand out amongst other Genesis games. Really good-looking, cool game. Wasn’t the cartridge unusually expensive? I seem to recall it being unattainable when I was a kid, though I wanted it. I only ever rented it.
Blue sky, the developers behind it, where also responsible for Starflight, the best iteration of the original pc game, and the best Jurassic Park game that exists (IMO).
And also Shadowrun! How many great, unique titles they churned, and yet were responsible for Ariel the little mermaid…
They also are the creators of one of the few enjoyable 32x titles with Spiderman’s web of fire.
Sadly Titus interactive killed it.
For Vectorman, the character never appealed to me, though props for those smooth 60 frames per second on a 16 bit title!
I’ve tried so many times to get into both of them, but the controls and game feel are just kinda off for me, and I usually don’t get far past the beginning stage. I don’t think it’s Vectorman’s fault though. I have this problem with a lot of later Genesis releases. The difficulty and the jank of the controls or mechanics put me off playing past the few levels, which is a shame because they are stunning for 16 bit titles.