Not your GOAT game, that is a pointless and circular and pointless conversation - I want to hear what games made a profound impression on your appreciation for the medium? Here are my 3 - for reference I got exposed to this flavour of brainrot in the 16-bit era.
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Bubsy the Bobcat: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind - in retrospect a really not-great game, it was on demo at a Blockbuster video near where i grew up and is likely the gateway drug that got me into the medium.
The cartoon graphics were really nice, the punny titles were beautifully groan-inducing and the wealth of idle and death animations felt revolutionary at the time, but the brutally wonky hit-detection and one-hit kills were an exercise in frustration.
These was something incredibly hilarious about gaining a huge amount of momentum and just barrelling through the really quite well-designed levels, only to plow straight into a Wookie and trigger a funny death animation, however.
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Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors - There was a games arcade in a mall 40 minutes away that i really didn’t get the frequent opportunity to visit. On one such occasion, as a lightie with no coin for tokens, i stumbled upon the arcade machine for Darkstalkers and watched the attract mode for an hour easily, utterly transfixed by the incredible imagination that went into the art direction, design and animation.
For a one-on-one 2D fighter about monstrous creatures of the night to lean so heavily into goofy stylisation was truly an inspired choice, and the zombie Zabel and fluffball Sasquatch remain likely the most memorable character designs in my mind to this day.
There was truly no thought spared for expedience in the animation, with madly deforming moves and nutty expressiveness that would unfortunately be borderline unachievable with 3D-modelling without being madly inefficient,dashing any hope that it may ever be resurrected for modern audiences as Street Fighter 4 producer Yoshinoro One once teased.
I only got to actually play the game much, much later and it was a well-designed game with very interesting mechanics that still hold up.
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Earthworm Jim - Dave Perry had earned some level of success and autonomy with titles like Cool Spot and the Disney’s Aladdin (Sega version specifically) tie-in being massively successful. With that in his back pocket, he formed Shiny and they came out swinging with this absolute banger.
Earthworm Jim manages to encapsulate everything that was good about the era of Beavis and Butthead and Ren and Stimpy into a for-the-time-amazing-looking-game with fluid animation and imaginative and hilarious set-pieces.
You play as an earthworm who had a sentient spacesuit fall on him, naturally. The first boss you encounter is a grimy junkyard owner who pukes fish and does armpit farts. The cow you catapult through the air makes it’s return at the very end. The hell level is hilarious in ways it has no right to be, with Mussorgsky and muzak alternately providing the soundtrack to battling lawyers and the cat who presides. The mad scientist’s laboratory level being called “Level 5”. The snot monster bungee-jumping battle. The post-level asteroid belt races with hillbilly banjo music.
Never not fun, never not hilarious and a legitimately good, challenging game besides, this was a pinnacle of art and design that I don’t think has been matched since, not even by the same team.
