Technically Impressive Games That Don't Get The Recognition They Deserve
 

Technically I always thought Z-Out didn't receive the widespread recognition it deserved (also a fantastic shooter if a person persists enough to learn attack waves, etc. but not the point here). While early on it lacks things like parallax scrolling it's always nice and fast/slick, often with lots of bullets and enemies flying around, some of the latter quite large.
As the game progresses though things get even more visually impressive, with multiple levels of parallax, reflections, under water effects, background animation, etc., at times concurrently. The mother ship level I recall being quite impressed with.

Does anyone else have any examples of games whose technical merits didn't get the recognition they deserved?
Games like Elfmania, Lionheart, Brian The Lion obviously make good use of the Amiga, but most people have seen these. I'm more interested in games, or even sections of games that aren't so widely known.

I always thought Bob's Bad Day did a good job of rotating the entire screen smoothly (albeit with minimal backgrounds), something an Amiga was at a big disadvantage for against the SNES. Datastorm's graphics may not look stunning in stills, but it's moving so much around at such high speed with no slowdown. Fightin' Spirit came far too late to be famous but it's a truly stunning looking and feeling beat 'em up.

Liberation: Captive II http://hol.abime.net/883/screenshot https://youtu.be/T1SPOop-Udk?t=388

Maybe it's because under all that shine, the game isn't really that great, and ultimately that's what matters.

Perhaps, but the question is about technically impressive games and not specifically about good games ;)

I think hand with gun is 3D object like enemies, it's impressive even with this small playfield.

Tubular Worlds AGA is technically impressive shmup. Loads happening on screen and smooth scrolling. Gameplay is not so great.

But then it is obvious they would not get recognition if they are bad! :D

Sword of Sodan : http://hol.abime.net/2246

Core's Blastar was technically impressed game (lot of action, fast animation, big well animated sprites, good amount of bullets on screen, fast translation between different levels, lot of nice small animations like intro and shop docking sequence, some nice organic background animation on second stage), but it was also not well balanced with prices of new weapons in shop so You need to grind a lot on early 360 stages to have chance with quick killing bosses and passing later shmups parts.

@Disposablehero

I Seem to remember that Bob's Bad Day is not rotating the screen but rather using predefined animation frames on a grid of what are called now vectorballs: that was a less processor-heavy way to do that kind of rotation, similar to the first Sonic special stage and Awesome and unlike the Cameltry arcade that instead was really rotating the screen buffer

Yeah you can see that it's a bunch of little objects being rotated and not a whole thing. Still, pretty nice effect. And a good game with nice puzzles, let down by incredibly unbearable "music".

In the case of Sword of Sodan, it might actually deserve two technical awards:
- Best graphics and objects size.
- Best unplayability (ever).

Seriously, they must have worked really hard on making it unplayable. After 15 minutes I still could not go any further than the first few screens and had to stop in order to avoid rage-killing my cat.

Fantastic graphics, but I'm not sure it can really be called a game.
More like an interactive form of self torture. :D

Same playability problems have Mega Drive version.

Yes. Discussion over :spin

What a fantastic game. Incredibly open-ended. The UI for the droids is actually the UI for the game. Great music. Highly realistic damage system where the droids can literally be damaged beyond repair. The fear when encountering a giant laser-blasting robotic pet when breaking into an apartment. Getting mugged. Evading the police when fighting back after getting mugged. Hacking the city's computer system. And the satisfaction when that final clue gets you to the captive!

I would pay considerable amounts of money for a new version of Liberation. Imagine 4-player network play with each player controlling a different droid (or droids, if less than 4 people are playing). Or a massive open city to explore. Or hardware upgrades for the droids that are actually possible to understand and have real effects. :)

But knowing the market these days, though, it'd probably get turned into a full-on first-person shoot-'em-up, when it really should be more of an investigate-'em-up...

I actually completed Sword Of Sodan "back in the day", and without cheating.
Its not a great game, but it does improve a little as you progress.
Some of the later enemies are pretty cool. End of game "bad guy" is huge (pretty near to 1/2 the screen) and throws lots of projectiles at you.

The megadrive version is vastly inferior in pretty much every way. While I personally didn't mind the Amiga version I can understand other people finding it lacking in the gameplay department. The Megadrive version however took it to a level where it's not just bereft, but highly irritating. It also had worse graphics and sound.
Slight sidebar, but the 68k Mac version was very, very similar to the Amiga version, albeit with higher system requirements.

In regards to Liberation, I've always wanted to give it a proper try. Even have the cd32 original.
Nicely atmospheric intro, and it feels like there's a game I'd quite enjoy in there, but I've yet to spend enough time to learn it well enough to have a proper crack.

Rise of the Robots.

Spring Time with these moving platforms http://hol.abime.net/5390/screenshot But game have also nice gameplay.

Seek and destroy with its spinning map is also very interesting.

The 3d parts of Lorna are nice, speedy and smooth.