Another one I haven’t seen come up is Rastan III, which is a side scrolling beat ‘em that somehow dodges the inherent repetition of the genre to continually throw new ideas and situations at you.
I was gonna reply with this: classic beatem ups! Tmnt, xmen, knights of the round.. also light gun games could have pretty amazing progression/late game set pieces.
The Luigi's mansion arcade game was very blatant about this. First stage had branching paths and a handful of other gimmicks/mechanics that are just not present in any other stage after the first. All the effort was put into stage 1 and nothing else.
Elevator Action Returns, Sunset Riders, New Zealand Story, Strider/Osman are some off the top of my head. there's also more obscure stuff like The Outfoxies or Lucky & Wild
A thousand years ago it was a lot of fun to play TMNT or X-Men beat-em-ups together with 2 or 3 friends. Spent a lot of quarters on this sort of thing. (Dunno how they hold up with infinite credits, and they certainly aren’t as much fun to play alone)
I always loved co-op games, but they're not really viable outside of couch coop(perfect sync, but good luck finding people to join you) or accepting all of the lag hiding bullshit every moden game does
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https://youtu.be/X11yiwgrnfU?si=1vxWVl0ManEj6nV3
Hydro Thunder.
Asteroids.