shmups with good multi-sprite animated mecha bosses?

[komatik]

Looking for suggestions for games that have large detailed mecha bosses composed of multiple sprites with a fair amount of animation.

Bosses in shmups are pretty boring to me- for the most part they're almost always a giant static image that floats around the screen with a few do-dads stuck on, like a DVD player screensaver that shoots at you. Usually a plane/boat/tank with spinning turrets or something.... bosses that are just kinda 'there'. I want bosses that have some life to them, that actually walk around and change shape and do stuff, even if it's basically just flavor animation that doesn't really affect gameplay it's at least better than nothing. The games that avert this trope tend to go with designs that have big arms or legs (eg; the crab walker tanks at the beginning of Raiden II or the octopus boss of Daioh) but that's not a requirement. Mechanical preferred, I'm tired of bugs and aliens.


edited for clarity

[Shepardus]

Armed Police Batrider has some. Deviate, Grubby, and Bashinet mk. 2 are probably the most relevant to the thread, but the game in general has a lot of examples of bosses consisting of multiple, often destructible, parts.

Cambria Sword has a bunch of nicely-animated multi-sprite bosses, though most aren't mechanical.

[Flashman]

Aero Fighters 2 on NeoGeo springs to mind, the first level boss is a walking 4 legged mec - be prepared though, the later levels are quite challenging.

[BulletMagnet]

I think that Axelay, Space Megaforce/Super Aleste, and Rayforce/Layer Section might have at least one or two bosses that fit the bill.

[SuperDeadite]

Guardian Force

[komatik]

Edited my post for clarity. Also: I'm mainly looking for retro games that play well on phones and Raspberry Pis, so I'm leaning towards 16bit consoles and MAME as opposed to newer stuff like Steam.

[WelshMegalodon]

In addition to the obligatory four-legged mech, TwinBee Yahho! also features a pair of giant bald men that dance around the screen while spraying bullets.

There's also the egghead dancer from Sexy Parodius. I'm not sure how well this or Yahho! will run on a Pi, though.

[komatik]

So I kinda take it from the responses here that this is a relative rarity in the shmup world? Only a few options with a couple examples each. I thought there were a lot more games that had big animated bosses.

[Xyga]

There isn't much space available on sceen, since most is used for the bullets and allow the player to move around.

As for the rather static behaviour, well there's a lot of planes, spaceships, fortresses, etc, those aren't expected to wiggle and twist like monkeys.

Polygonal 3D shmups can be more creative here, but not too RPi-friendly...

[gray117]

Whilst I kind of get where you're coming from it's probably a bit tough where to pull from or draw the line....

The 'substantial' one to my mind is Espagaluda 2, even though that might stretch your pixel/sprite definition depending on how you find their art. For some reason I'm including that over anything else in ketsui/ibara/pink sweets.

The kind-of-bland-one where I really liked the mecha tastes/touches has to be Strikers 1945 II... and even though it is a bit bland I really like playing this.

I seem to rember the gunbirds having some cool fun-styled mech stuff, but I don't like playing those games for some reason.

[Master O]

Looking for suggestions for games that have large detailed mecha bosses composed of multiple sprites with a fair amount of animation.

Bosses in shmups are pretty boring to me- for the most part they're almost always a giant static image that floats around the screen with a few do-dads stuck on, like a DVD player screensaver that shoots at you. Usually a plane/boat/tank with spinning turrets or something.... bosses that are just kinda 'there'. I want bosses that have some life to them, that actually walk around and change shape and do stuff, even if it's basically just flavor animation that doesn't really affect gameplay it's at least better than nothing. The games that avert this trope tend to go with designs that have big arms or legs (eg; the crab walker tanks at the beginning of Raiden II or the octopus boss of Daioh) but that's not a requirement. Mechanical preferred, I'm tired of bugs and aliens.

edited for clarity

Guwange had some well animated ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPfwRJ-tGrw

[OmegaFlareX]

Dogyuun maybe?

Also I'm not the biggest Psikyo fan, but the bosses in the Strikers 1945 series are really cool. 1 is good-ol-fashioned dot art, 2 and 3 are prerendered sprites.