Which of Rare's N64 games do you think was their best, and why?

Donkey Kong 64. Just a great game with epic bosses.

Banjo Tooie, then DK64, then Banjo Kazooie, then GoldenEye, and then Diddy Kong Racing. The rest I never played. It's amazing how many fantastic games they made in that era. This thread makes me miss the old RARE days. Sea of Thieves was such a letdown. I am rather excited for the one they have coming up, but I am bring cautious.

Banjo-Kazooie.

Banjo-Kazooie and DKR. Followed by Goldeneye, KI Gold and lastly, rounding up the top 5, is Jet Force Gemini.

Perfect Dark. I loved Goldeneye and it got way more play but being able to give orders to your AI teammates just blew me away (i.e. defend this spot, target a specific player, ect). Conker's Bad Fur Day was great and I played quite a bit of Killer Instinct in the Arcades.

Perfect Dark. They took what made Goldeneye amazing and improved on it in every single way.
They had also gotten pretty intimate with the hardware by this point and employed a ton of effects that just weren't common during the era like reflections.

GoldenEye for sure.
It was THE multiplayer game of that gen. Few games have had such a craze associated with them. If you were a gamer and you weren't playing GoldenEye like there was something wrong with you haha. I remember there was even an article in our school newspaper about the game. GoldenEye was the original video game craze, and for good reason.


Perfect Dark had like more options and stuff, and it was cool it had AI bots for deathmatch, but just wasn't as good a game. Still fantastic though.

Banjo Kazooie was amazing and behind Mario 64 was the premier platformer that gen. Never played Banjo Tooie.

Diddy Kong Racing was a fun different take from the Mario Kart formula. I played it years later and it did not age as well as MK64, but at the time it was great.

Jet Force Gemini was a lot of fun but then after you beat the boss the first time it forced you to have to try to rescue every single one of the little ewok-type creatures, if memory serves, and that was just tedious as hell and not worth it. But up until then it was a great game, just bad gameplay decision by the creators kind ruined the whole experience.

KI Gold was a great upgrade from the original Killer Instinct. A very solid fighting game. The ultimate combo fighter.

Blast Corps was a weird concept but a great game. I remember the day I beat the game and then you go to the moon and all the planets so there's a bunch more levels. One of the coolest post-game contents I've ever seen and at that time post-game wasn't even a thing yet so it blew my mind!

I had Conker but never played much into it so can't make a call on it.

DK64 sucked and was easily the biggest disappointment of any N64 first party game. It was just boring. Glad Nintendo realized after the failure that was DK64 that they should stick to DKC 2D games in the future. DK64 was probably the only super hyped up AAA Nintendo game to just be awful. I remember it was marketed as like bigger and better than Mario 64 in every way, and then it was just a dud of a game.

By the time DK64 released, I was tired of the Rare style but looking at it today, it's a goddam masterpiece.

*Edit* Dammit. Forgot Conker. That game was/is spectacular. I replay it all the time...on Xbox. Still, at the time the game was a miracle on the N64 hardware.

Goldeneye. Perfect Dark is a close second. It's multiplayer is even better with the bots (I hated Perfect Sim so much), but Goldeneye laid the foundation and had a great singleplayer.

I did not realize how prolific Rare was on the N64. Why did Nintendo sell them to Microsoft? Seems like they were a huge asset.