Platformers/racing games have been on my mind, and I'll probably talk about them a bunch. So for future reference, I'm gonna quickly define two styles of movement you see in games - burst & continuous.
Burst Movement - This style movement happens in quick, isolated bursts (usually expressed via player states) and doesn't transfer momentum or build on itself. The purest styles of burst movement also cancel any momentum that you had before you entered the state. Examples would be Megaman's slide (X's dash too, though it carries speed when you jump), Max's slide in Streets of Rage 2, Symphony of the Night's backdashes.
It's a simpler style of movement that's discrete, as such when games become more deep/difficult, they start ramping up the complexity of inputs, frequency of inputs & strictness. They tend to feel more like fighting game combos at higher levels - strict, sudden bursts of complex inputs.
Continuous movement - This style of movement is granular. Every one of your inputs and every interaction with the terrain or level elements feeds back into movement, influencing your subsequent inputs. This style of movement has few if any resets, and it snowballs hard - you can fail a challenge 10 seconds before you even attempted it by, say, not building up enough momentum. It's hard to find truly continuous games, though Quake 3/Defrag is as close as you will get. Games like N++, Marble It Up and racing sims such as Dirt Rally also come close.
These sorts of games ramp up the amount of interconnectivity between actions and use level design to capitalize on snowballing/lack thereof for difficulty. High level play is all about a very deep intuitive understanding of the underlying movement simulation and very subtle nuanced adjustments to movement. It often doesn't look that impressive to those who don't understand the subtleties of the games.
Almost all games are some kind of middle ground between burst & continuous movement, and the two often interact.
Also Once again, I'm sure someone else has made these distinctions so if you know of any articles feel free to send them over.