Capcom's Bionic Commando (1988) built an entire game around a missing verb: you cannot jump. Press the button and nothing happens. Instead you traverse with a bionic grappling arm, firing it at an angle, catching a ceiling and swinging, or latching a ledge and hauling yourself up.

Taking away the jump forces you to plan movement in a way a platformer normally doesn't. You can't correct in midair, so a swing has to be aimed before you commit, and the arc you get depends on where the hook lands and how much momentum you had going in. There's a real skill ceiling to it. Players who put the time in chain swings together without touching the floor, and the game's hardest stretches assume you can.

The structure borrows from the arcade Commando lineage Capcom already had: a world map of enemy areas with helicopter drops, neutral zones you can enter to eavesdrop, and a radio system where you talk to HQ and to enemy channels using codes you've collected. Wander into the wrong area unprepared and a truck full of soldiers pins you in a side-scrolling chase.

It's also surprisingly dark, and the ending is the famous part. The enemy is reviving a dead leader, and the localization renamed him Master D and gave him a very particular haircut and moustache rather than name him outright. What happens to his head at the end of the game was not sanded off at all, and it remains one of the most startling things on the console.

Inventive, tough, and unlike anything else on the system. The no-jump gimmick should have been a limitation. Instead it's the whole appeal, and Capcom kept returning to it for twenty years.