This is the main player sprite from the Open Gunner graphics pack that I made some months ago.

The Open Gunner gfx pack is a high quality collection of free sprites that I released under a Creative Commons license; this means that they can be freely used in games and other projects, even commercial ones, as long as you credit me as the author of the graphics.

You can download the Open Gunner graphics packs from OpenGameArt:
http://opengameart.org/content/open-gunner-starter-kit
http://opengameart.org/content/open-gunner-expansion-pack-1

The main character has over 100 frames of animation for various actions, including 10 shooting directions, wall jumping, spin jumps, ladder climbing, pipe hanging and other cool stuff.

The aim was to create a sprite that could do all the things that Megaman, Turrican and Contra could do, and I think the end result was pretty good.

The gfx pack also includes enemies, level tiles, GUI building blocks, and even font sets, literally everything that you need to make a game. :)