Rage Racer (PlayStation)

It's a real toss up for me as to which Ridge Racer game I like the best.  My opinion tends to seesaw between Rage Racer and R4.  As polished as the latter is, and as fantastic of a soundtrack as it may have, I still find myself playing the former more.  Between the track designs, and the cars, it has an appeal that is hard to quantify.

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.

Burning Force (Genesis / Mega Drive)

While Space Harrier may get the lions share of attention among arcade shooters where the camera is behind your character, and everything is scrolling forward, there are a number of other games out there that also do this.  One such example would be Namco's Burning Force, where you played as a young female cadet that drove around on a futuristic motorcycle that could be converted into a jet.  The big draw for me with this game was heavy anime art usage throughout.  In a time when anime was hard to come by in my neck of the woods I had to take what I could get.  >_<