Sometimes you don’t want to be a dog or cat when you play.
Animals have been playable in video games for a long time. In the 1990s, when mascots were all the rage, there was a big increase in the number of games with playable animals. Many of the most popular ones are animals like cats and dogs that are often kept as pets. Stray, which was up for Game of the Year in 2022, was a big draw because you played as a cute cat.
But there are also a lot of playable animals that aren’t very common or that you may have never even heard of. This type is especially common in games made in other countries, where many of the animals can’t be found anywhere in the U.S.
Chameleon And Bat – Yooka-Laylee
A bear and a bird were already playable characters in Banjo-Kazooie, but they were not very well-known. That was unusual for the time, but the game’s spiritual successor, which came out a few decades later, lets you play as even stranger animals. In Yooka-Laylee, you play as a chameleon named Yooka and a bat named Laylee.
The choice of chameleon might be a nod to the Chameleon Twist games for N64, which are also not very well-known. At least the animal choices were good, since Laylee and Yooka both have powers that fit their personalities. It’s crazy that the game’s creators had to come up with even rarer animals to play as.
Squirrel – Conker
When Conker’s Bad Fur Day came out in 2001, it was one of the few platform games where you could play as a squirrel. On the Genesis and SNES, there were some games like Mr. Nutz, but it was still rare. Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one of the last great games that could only be played on the N64 before the GameCube came out.
Due to the popularity of the game, there were a few more platformers where you could play as a squirrel, the most well-known of which was Super Lucky’s Tale. But Conker is still the most famous and well-known squirrel in video games. Even though his original game doesn’t make full use of what he can do as a squirrel, it’s still a big part of who he is.
Hedgehog, Echidna… So Many More – Sonic
Sonic is a hedgehog. Before the first Sonic game came out, most Americans probably didn’t even know that hedgehogs were real animals. Sega didn’t stop there, though, and most of Sonic’s characters are animals that aren’t very well known. If you used to play Sonic 3, you probably thought an echidna was a made-up animal, but it’s not. It’s just a rare animal that lives in Australia and a few other nearby places.
Then there’s the whole Chaotix team, which includes Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, Charmy Bee, and Mighty the Armadillo. All four are uncommon to play as in the world of games. There are a few common animals on the Sonic team, like the two cats Big and Blaze, but most of them are unusual.
Opossum – Sparkster
In the Sparkster games by Konami, the main character is an opossum. Not a possum, but an opossum, since the two animals are different. Since Awesome Possum came out the same year, maybe Konami had to change things up a bit. In the 1990s, companies were just digging around to find strange animals to use as mascots.
To be fair, Sparkster, as he was in the first game, was very cute and is probably still the most famous opossum in video games. All four Sparkster games are pretty good and worth playing, but the first one is especially good and is one of the best Genesis games.
Mosquito – Mister Mosquito
Mister Mosquito is one of the PS2’s real cult classics that doesn’t get talked about as much as games like Chulip and Gitaroo Man. At the time it came out, it was a very unique game. You play as a mosquito. It might be the only game for consoles where you can play as a mosquito for the whole thing.
You live in the Yamada family’s house and, as a mosquito, feed on the blood of the people who live there. In the game, you have to get blood from certain parts of the body, which isn’t true to life because mosquitos don’t have a preference for that, but they do have a preference for certain people as hosts.
Penguin – Penguin Adventure
There are a lot of penguins in games, but not that many that you can play as. There are a lot of penguins in Mario games, and they even have their own power-up suit, but none of them can be played as. Penguin Adventure by Konami for the MSX home computer was one of the first games to have this feature.
It’s an interesting game that looks like a simple endless runner, but it also has minigames and boss fights, which is cool to see. This Happy Wheels game is also important because it was the first thing that a guy named Hideo Kojima ever worked on.
Spider And Scorpion – Deadly Creatures
Here are some strange animals for a strange game in the Wii game Deadly Creatures. In this game, you play as both a spider and a scorpion and fight other animals that are the same size or bigger than you. As you play, you follow the story of two men, whose voices are done by Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton, who are looking for gold that has been buried.
It’s cool to play as these two animals, and killing other things in a beat-em-up style is really something else when you’re in charge. In this way, the experience is a bit of a novelty, and it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for an unusual Wii game.
Dolphin – Ecco
Another game from the early 1990s made by Sega is Ecco the Dolphin. You play as Ecco, who acts and feels just like a dolphin should. He moves so smoothly, but it can be hard to get used to the controls. Ecco uses biological sonar, just like real dolphins do. In the game, this lets you see the map, which you’ll need a lot.
The plot is a little off track, and it’s not at all what you’d think it would be based on the cover. Most people back then didn’t sign up for a story about going back in time to fight aliens. Still, Ecco is probably the most well-known dolphin in video games, and dolphins aren’t something you see very often in games.
Octopus – Octodad
In the early 2010s, strange physics-based games with weird controls were all the rage. Surgeon Simulator went viral a year before Octodad: Dadliest Catch came out, and funny enough, both games ended up with co-op control schemes. Octodad doesn’t move like an actual octopus or have the feel of one, but that’s the point.
The game is mostly funny because Octodad interacts with all these regular people, and the controls are set up so that you can flail all your limbs around. Still, Octodad is the only octopus character that most people can think of that you can play as, which makes him unique.
Kangaroo – Streets Of Rage 3
Streets of Rage 2 was one of the best beat-em-ups of all time, so Streets of Rage 3 had big shoes to fill. In the end, it wasn’t as good as its predecessors, but in one way it was better. That was characters you could unlock. In Streets of Rage 3, you could unlock three different fighters. Roo, the kangaroo, was the most interesting of the three.
At the time, it was so weird to see a kangaroo you could play as in an otherwise serious beat-em-up series. There are a few other games where you can play as a kangaroo, but they fit with the style of the series. Because Roo is so out of place, he is a special case and one of the things Sega fans remember most about the third game.
