Red: Viewtiful Joe

When I heard about Clover's first fruit of labor, I was hardly interested, watching videos and seeing screenshots of this 2D, cel-shaded beat-em-up that supposedly had these crazy-ass filters in it that made it look cool.
I eventually happened upon a demo disc that featured the game within it's line-up. I put it off for a while, but eventually I bit.And suddenly, I realized something: I was having fun. It was pretty simple to understand, and I played the demo over several times and commited myself to getting the game when it became available.
Viewtiful Joe was a pretty simple game that playfully mocked Devil May Cry in some fun ways, but it also slapped a lot of gamers in the face with it's surprising difficulty. On low difficulties it was fairly easy to blaze through, but when you get to higher difficulties like V-Rated the paper enemies suddenly become monstrous harbingers of pain and torment(ESPECIALLY Cromarties. I HATE Cromarties...).
More than anything else, though, what made me like the game so much was Joe himself, thanks in part to Dee Baker's voice work. Joe is like Dante, basically, if Dante were more of a dork and far less angsty. Joe actually spends the majority of the first game simply goofing off and not actually pursuing whatever objective the narrator is claiming he is, all the while busting out ridiculous poses and sending enemies to the moon and back. Joe's self-affirmations while beating the tar out of everyone in slo-mo really make it feel fun as they bounce off of walls and eachother only to find Joe right back in their faces.