With all due respect to Seany-Mo, any top 5 list of N64 games that doesn't end with GoldenEye 007 as the clear cut champ is a complete traveshammockery. A traveshammockery. But to rank that wonky-ass Zelda game anywhere near the top 5? That's just an abomination.
I guess it's not his fault, Seany is a few years younger and in all likelihood wasn't exposed to the Legend of Zelda. That was a real game that holds its place in the top 3 all time, any platform. Frankly, I think Ocarina of Time was the downfall of video games as I knew them. I'm not a hardcore gamer, I just want to pick up the controllers and play, I don't want to have to learn nuances, I don't want to have to have my character walk through a village and stop and talk to fucking elves and sprites for 5 goddamn minutes at a time just to have them tell me a story that I'm paying no attention to whatsoever. I just want to grab as many jewels as possible and buy as many awesome weapons as I can hold. That's it. And this game was the start of all those negative traits. It literally took a half hour to get anywhere because you had to continuously stop and read these painfully scripted exchanges. All I wanna do is stab that frigen shopkeeper so he'll finally shut up.
But enough about Zelda, I didn't come here to talk about that. I came here to pledge my allegiance to GoldenEye, the most revolutionary video game of all time. Yea there were first person shooters before, Doom, Duke Nukem, etc...but there was never a multi-player high quality first person that you could equally get lost in for hours by yourself, or mindlessly pick up the controllers and fuck around with your friends for a half hour and then walk away. This is what video games are all about.
We were so into GoldenEye, that even when we would shutdown the system for a bit, we created a real life GoldenEye game in my friends basement, using various sporting balls as weapons, we'd just shut the lights out and let the games begin (the street hockey ball was the Golden Gun of our game, one shot dropped you flat).
Coupled with the fact, that to this day, the strategies I developed playing GoldenEye are still the basis for my strategies in modern first person shooter games, there's just no way this doesn't rank number one. Ever since I realized you could just post up in a tower or air vent somewhere and just snipe people all day, that's all I've ever wanted to do in video games since. I'd drive my friends crazy in Team Slayer on Halo because I was more content to scout out a spot with the sniper rifle or rocket launcher and just hold fort all day, killing like 5 people the whole session, over running ramped in that free for all madness, and I learned that strategy from no less of an authority than Bond himself, so who's going to really tell me I'm wrong?
And finally, right now, I'm bidding on N64's on Ebay. You know what my first purchase is going to be? Bond? No, actually it's going to be MarioKart because the girlfriend loves that and I have to justify this purchase somehow. But then, the next game I bid on, that's going to be GoldenEye, not some lame fantasy land Zelda game.
