Adam: what you call "pointless fun" is what I call "the intrinsic/implicit joy of core game play". Definitely with you there. It's an important foundation for any game, and creates its own range of emotions which the rest of the game ought really to encourage and feed off of.
In no order (and attempting not to repeat anyone else's stuff):
Tie Fighter - That strange bank/roll you get when moving the mouse horizontally completely broke the feeling that you were just controlling simple variables like elite did (pitch or roll for each axis in that). The slightly complicated nature of the game made it feel more real, as if to say that real life can't be broken down into totally elegant rules (although... erm... it sorta can in a lot of cases
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Quake 2/3: I think both these games had fantastic movement, even if it was initially a bug. I mean, rocket jumping is one thing, but add strafe jumping and circle jumping to that, and you have a wonderful pallet for motion. And then in Quake 3 you get plasma skipping, too! I love the fact that a few whole mods (rocket olympics / defrag) have been dedicated to the movement of that game. Plenty of mods added movement abilities to the game - offhand grapplehooks made lithium really enjoyable since they let you move and fire independently.
Tribes: Skiing. Lovely. Again, unintentional.
Strider: Something about being able to transfer to so many surfaces makes me happy. It makes the world feel that much more tangible if your avatar is touching every surface, acknowledging it, rather than simply being stopped in mid air, frozen in a frame of animation, or worse, performing running cycles while not even moving. Also, sliding for a quick speed boost/attack is great.
Tenchu: The series needs a goddamn proper reboot. That initial feeling of freedom and exploration with a grapple hook which didn't care what surface you used it on, or where you wanted to go... flipping fantastic. The flipping was also fantastic. Controls are probably a bit dated now, but that grapple hook... oh man.
I can't remember the game, but I'm sure there's one where if you roll and then jump, you get a speed boost out of it. That was nice.
Hoop\/\/orld: Alright, I'm totally biased, but the early stages of the previous version of this had movement which was shaping up really nicely... somewhere between Mario 64 and N.
N: Can't ignore Raigan and Mare who seemed to have this natural understanding of motion. So many games take this approach of letting the animation dictate a humanoid character's speed and behaviour. In N, it feels like it was done the opposite way - their pseudo physics with its feeling of weight and inertia made you happy when you transferred built up speed into a huge wall run, and sad when you got fast enough to crater into the ground. Lovely balance of risk and reward, that.
JediKnight: had a few awkward movement modifiers (not exactly fun reaching up to F2 to do a force jump, and having force speed last a fixed amount of time felt weird, too) but I wanted to point it out as one of the few games where you can crater when hitting walls! Makes a lot of sense, really. More consisent. I'd rather not crater at all, and simply encourage smooth movement through positive re-enforcement, though.
Prince of Persia Classic: Actually, I mention this because of the recent XBLA update. I really HATE PoP's movement in terms of "Feel". There's the arguement that it's very realistic, because choosing to jump does involve readying ones' self and the lag inherent in that, and one is not always in control of ones' movement - if you're knocked off balance, you're out of control, right? I never really bought that argument: If you're knocked down, you can still choose how to fall, and possibly even right yourself. If you're making a jump... well, there's an infinite number of ways to jump - not just the way Jordan Mechner's brother did it once. That's the fundamental problem I have with a lot of finite state machine based animation - so many of the animations have no interactivity. Motion and choice are minimized to what the animators prescribed, and you're simply left waiting for windows to open for your tiny bandwidth of input. The mistakes you make are amplified as you wait for the prince to step one step after briefly fudging a movement on the joypad. The new XBLA version of PoP has done a lot to make the game more responsive - quicker animations, more transitions etc. All good stuff. Unfortunately, you can't "fix" this gameplay without fundamentally changing it. You can only really improve what's there. Ideally, I think you just want to make sure that for every state you give a player, they have some kind of control, even if it's limited. Example: in Hoop\/\/orld, when you were knocked back, you could still alter your direction... give the fall a bit of "english" as it were. If you mashed buttons, you could "snap out of it" mid air, going into a double jump, a bit like StreetFighter Alpha 3. Ofcourse, it's always hard to marry the ideals of realistic/smooth animation with responsive controls. PoP: Sands of Time does a lot to remedy this though...
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time: While this is still a finite state machine based animation system, and while very few of the moves have any "english" i.e. you can only really wall run in three discrete directions), I still felt great moving around in this game. The controls remained fairly responsive, not by breaking the animation (much) but by introducing loads and loads of transition opportunities within the animation. Wondering why the prince takes so many mini-steps in a wall run (apart from trying to seem a bit realistic)? Well, its because each step on the wall can transition out to a wall-jump animation, so the quicker the step, the quicker you could typically transfer into an alternate state without the transition looking broken. When you use a horizontal bar to swing around, you don't have to wait to circle the bar before you make a jump like you do in Tomb Raider legend, allowing you to speed through sections of the game. The level design was remarkably consistent in this first game, never leaving you too confused about your route once you learned the conventions of what you could and couldn't use for movement. Bit linear, but assassin's creed promises to remedy that. PoP:SoT proved to me that FSMA is not as fundamentally flawed as I thought.
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