Yeah Silpheed is a great example of designing a game around the strengths of its target hardware. Because they were able to focus the art design around what could be streamed at high quality off a 1x CD drive, the FMV works a lot better than it did in games like Night Trap and Wirehead that tried to shoehorn live action video into a console that wasn't capable of displaying it at a decent quality. The actual gameplay is similar to an early 1980s arcade game like Galaga, but I agree with you that the presentation makes it worth playing at least a few levels of Silpheed even now.

The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I pull it up on Youtube once a year or so just for kicks.

Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card. The MT-32 version blew my twelve-year-old mind.

I remember when people would talk about a new game they hadn't yet tried and the first question was "How are the graphics?". They truly did amazing work back then to push the limits of systems so they could present things that the machine wasn't expressly built to accomplish.

Watching the video linked at the end of the article my first thought was "Starfox, eat your heart out", but watching the gameplay I noted that at its core its a really basic shooter and it can be quite hard to keep track of the enemies and projectiles with the background going nuts like that.

I just saw a video of it. Impressive. Were the enemy ships hand drawn 3D plastered on sprites? Or was there some actual realtime 3D rendered by the CPU? The boss ship I saw looked like realtime 3D.