Shout Out / Vanquish

• If you mash the melee button with the Assault Rifle equipped, you'll pull off a barrage of punches akin to Gene from God Hand. His fists even glow orange. Sam also uses this move near the end of the first Bogey fight, with the camera even focusing on his glowing hand while charging up a straight punch.
• Adding to the above, the highest difficulty is labeled as "God Hard".
• Another nod to God Hand are the dancing enemy robots in the Kreon in Act 3-7, complete with a huge boombox (actually a Chicane in disguise).
• More from that aforementioned ball-bustingly hard game: An achievement is called "The Hand of God", awarded for finishing two Romanovs in a row with nothing but melee attacks.
• In fact, some of the achievements' names are shout outs, including "Gun Runner", "Helloooo, Nurse", "Fisher Is The Other Sam", and "Flash! King of the Impossible".
• Burns shouts "C'mon, you apes! You wanna live forever?!" in the game's prologue.
• If you wait for a while outside of combat, Burns talks about his "Whiskey-a-Go-Go". He also mentions his "old pal Jack".
• This amusing exchange after an ambush in Act 2:
  Elena: It's a trap!
  Sam: Thanks for the update, Admiral!
• The ship that the protagonists board the space colony with looks like a Blockade Runner from the Star Wars verse.
• In a Quick Time Event, Sam drills through the quadrupedal Argus in Act 2 by activating the suit's jets and spinning insanely fast. Unsurprisingly, Mikami has gone on record as saying that Vanquish was a bit of a tribute to Neo Human Casshern.
• One of the soldiers under Burns's command has the designation Gray Fox, and the radio system, outside of cutscenes, works a lot like a real-time Codec. Which is appropriate, considering Platinum would go on to make Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
• There are several nods to Gundam's Universal Century:
  • The hero tearing through a space colony in an experimental white prototype suit while the enemy ace is introduced in a fast-flying red equivalent.
  • The microwave emitter being a stand-in for the Colony Laser.
  • Preventing meteors from hitting earth.
  • And Burns' later gear fashioned after the GP-02A Physalis, a machine turned against its side.
• The "Unknown" robot fights almost similarly to the Golem of Bayonetta - a mecha with a detachable red core that can shuffle forms and re-assemble its parts when severely damaged.

---