2. Goldeneye 007 (Nintendo 64)
While never my favorite Rareware shooter–that honor goes to Perfect Dark–Goldeneye showed us what was possible on a console with tight controls, four player multiplayer on the then innovative Nintendo 64 (no multitap necessary here, folks) and a storyline that somehow managed to go hand-in-hand with its movie without coming off as nonsensical or awful. Even today, with far more refined shooters on the market, people who played it back in the 90s want to see it come to either Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade. Maybe with a 1080p version of Perfect Dark that runs at a locked 60 frames per second, people will realize that Rareware’s second go of it on the N64 was actually better due to fantastic weaponry and an incredibly deep multiplayer experience that included bots. They are going to have to, since the legal hurdles for Goldeneye 007 reaching either service are too imposing and difficult to vault at present.
I loved Goldeneye, but I was never as good at it as I wanted to be. It’s probably because I didn’t own it, but just played it at all of my friend’s houses. Once I got Perfect Dark, we all switched over, but would play very often on the Goldeneye levels included in PD. I would love to see the game return to either of those digital distributors, though at least with XBLA the chance of seeing online play would increase.