I feel genuinely deprived that I didn't have much exposure to this back in the day. My hometown gaming group went straight from Villains & Vigilantes to Champions and never looked back, and in college I played maybe 3 sessions of MSH.
To this day, I’ve not found a superhero game I’ve enjoyed as much.
Funny - my group went the other way. Rather than deal with the particular complexity of Champions, we stuck with V&V. We found pretty much everything about it faster, including coming up with a character concept to play (hello, random tables!).
I don't have a particularly good comparison between James Bond 007 and the other main espionage RPG of the era, Top Secret, but 007 had its complexities. Difficulty factors, and bidding them for things like chase scenes, meant looking things up on a table and that's almost always a hallmark of a certain degree of complexity.
Star Frontiers Zebulons Guide might count. It was a conversion of SF to a system using the FASERIP resolution table.
Gangbusters occurred to me as well. IDK about TS, my memory of the systemn is beyond faint. That said, my memory of the cover art remains strong.
Eventually, I abandoned Champions/HERO because of that complexity, but for a while the appeal of building your character just so was really strong. That noodle-ability was too appealing for my noodly brain, and I realized there was kind of no end to it.
I have to revisit that one. Didn't catch with us when it came out and we never played FASERIP.
(Dungeons & Dragons)
Rulebook featuring "high magic" options, including a host of new spells.
