Dragon Spirit (TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine)

Long before series like Panzer Dragoon had us flying around on dragons fighting evil, there were games like Dragon Spirit challenging us with this.  It's a solid little shmup with decent controls, and cool power-ups.  As opposed to the traditional combination of regular attacks and super bombs found in other games in the genre, here you had air attacks and ground attacks, and had to make good use of both in order to succeed.  Boss fights were pretty tough, as was the game as a whole because once you ran out of lives it was game over with no continues.