Now that you mention Cool Cats and Mortal Kombat, the only thing I want is for someone to mod Scorpion's voice files to have Erik Estrada's "There he is!" instead of "Get over here!"
The gameplay loop that immediately comes to mind is from the Souls series, specifically Dark Souls since it was the first one I played, and as such the first time I came in contact with it. That was the first time a game had really struck me as being a learning experience, where you die frequently and aren't allowed to progress until you had effectively mastered a section of the game. When I was playing Dark Souls I didn't yet have the understanding that you can just run past the majority of the regular enemies the games throw at you if you don't want to deal with them, so I had this wonderful image in my head of restarting from the bonfire and rewriting history until I achieved the best possible version of reality with regards to my performance in that area.
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