I’m mostly thinking about 8 bit games, and NES in particular, but it was a thing that continued at least into the 16-bit consoles. There were a lot of games that come to mind that did the perspective shift, sometimes blending genres in the process. Stuff like:
- Guardian Legend (sh’mup with 3rd person action)
- Blaster Master (mix of side scrolling and top down)
- Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link (top down, but sidescrolling battles and dungeons)
- Contra and Super C (change in perspective from side scrolling to top-down / 3rd person)
- Actraiser (sidescroller + god game)
- Battle Golfer Yui (adventure/golf game mashup)
I’m sure there’s plenty of others I’m not thinking of. It just feels creative, like even if in some cases a title might not be a “good” game, stuff like this just feels interesting, and there was a lot of experimentation with genre mashups and perspective changes like this in the 8 and 16-bit era.
I don’t have quite the experience with 16 but era but you still found this in 3D games. I was quite surprised and also quite enjoyed when Spyro 3 had top down shoot em up sections with sparx. And the first person shooter section too along with all the weird and wacky things they tried to spice up the gameplay from 2 (skateboarding dragons? more likely then you would think).
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy was pretty cool too. Sad we never got a sequel for that one. Not that you really played it for the story but there is always something a little sad about a cliff hanger that never gets resolved.
My copy was bugged and just froze about half way through. Finally had to bite the bullet on that one and find a GameCube ROM to finish it.