Conker was truly amazing. Not much by a gameplay standpoint but the atmosphere, the characters, the absurdity (you don't even have a neck!) and just the general feel of everything was awesome.

The fact it ran WITHOUT the extra Ram blows my mind even today. Don't know what kind of witchcraft was that.

Man, this post! Gotta agree with it.

Also, the soundtrack for GE was, as far as I remember, so much better than the one in PD. And many of those awesome tunes were carried to versus mode and sounded brilliant during it. I think you had only one single song for multiplayer mode in PD, is that correct? I have not played it as much as I did GE.

Don't forget the 2 Killer Instinct games for the arcade (notably the first one) and the SNES version. Man, those guys were doing stuff back then! 

P.S. Battletoads, anyone?

I also have a real soft spot for Conker's Bad Fur Day.

The British potty humour, the absurd characters and scenarios, and the immense variety made it such an incredibly fun romp.

Goldeneye 007. Playing 4 players split screen was great.

Now that I think back on it. This is how I'd rank the Rare lineup:

1. Goldeneye 007
2. Banjo Kazooie
3. Conker's BFD
4. Blast Corps
5. Diddy Kong Racing
6. Killer Instinct Gold
7. Jet Force Gemini
8. Banjo Tooie
9. Donkey Kong 64
10. Perfect Dark
11. Mickey Racing (honestly, I played this one only once or twice, but it was decent).

I don't think DK64 or Perfect Dark are bad games, very far from it. I think all of Rare's games (minus Mickey) range from great to the elite of the elite. My issue is neither DK64 or Perfect Dark really excited me all that much, and I didn't end up playing them nearly as much as other Rare games. They don't hold as special of a place in my heart as games like GE007.

I think one of the reasons Perfect Dark is getting as many votes as it is are people are treating it like a 1997 game equal to Goldeneye 007, but it came out in 2000, and the addition of slightly better graphics and some janky CPUs in multiplayer weren't enough of an improvement for me after three years of GE007.

Bare with me for this next bit (and read what I have to say after before you get all angry! =P), I know this sounds like a scathing review of Perfect Dark, but it is only my experience after playing GE007 for years before it even came out. Outside of the lack of fresh appeal, here is some of the stuff I DIDN'T like as much as GE007 that PD:
* The convoluted level design. Things were larger in scale, but they also added in annoying "find the key!" stuff in those much larger levels. "Find the key" was a thing in GE007 as well, but somehow, the smaller scale levels were never a problem. I also felt a lot of the environments in PD were samey. In GE007, you pretty much knew where you were at all times just by looking at your environments, not so with Perfect Dark.
* Weapons were uninspired. The only exception that comes to mind is that see-through-walls gun, which was really cool for a bit (until it became the blue shell of the game). Otherwise, GE007's weapons were much more fun to use. Nothing crazy like the mines, sniper rifle, and other cool stuff GE007 introduced. Dual wielding pistols was a fun gimmick, I suppose.
* Audio - Goldeneye sounded a lot better.
* Pacing - Perfect Dark was much slower, much of this is linked to poor level design, and spending a lot of time just running around.
* Lower action - GE007 felt almost felt like a beat 'em up on the level of Turtles in Time, in terms of entertaining action. Perfect Dark lacked that same appeal.
* Lower strategy - While everything in GE007 seemed to be designed around tricking your enemies so they'd fall into your traps, setting off alarms, lining up sniper shots, etc... Perfect Dark seemed to have less of this and more just running around... and running around and occasionally finding someone to shoot. I could be misremembering Perfect Dark here, I haven't played it in nearly 20 years, but I've played a lot of GE007 in the past 10, and I have done high difficulty stuff on GE007 (don't remember bothering with it in Perfect Dark).

That said, this game is FAR from bad, it's actually very good. Had I not played GE007 as much as I did, before, I probably would have liked it better. Many of the above issues I had above probably wouldn't have been big issues to me, or AS big of issues to me, had I played Perfect Dark in 1997 and GE007 in 2000 instead. I can't say, though.

I relate Perfect Dark to my experience with Smash Bros Melee, when that game came out, I had already played the original Smash Bros 64 for hundreds of hours, and found myself tired of Melee within 5 hours. This isn't always the case with sequels: Mario Kart 64 was the opposite, I found this one was sufficiently different from the original on SNES, that I probably ended up playing it even more than the original (which I played A TON of). Perfect Dark, felt samey, and most of the stuff it did differently I found was more problematic than something that distinguished it.

With Donkey Kong 64, it seemed like Rare's equivalent to the film Heaven's Gate. It was a massive game that they clearly pumped a lot into, but it didn't have the soul of Banjo Kazooie. Banjo Kazooie for me was a special experience, one I liked MORE than Super Mario 64 which I was impressed by, but felt lacked the appeal of Mario World and Mario 3. But Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 perfected the formula - and I won't get into Odyssey here =P (It did a LOT right, but I found it missed the mark of Galaxy in many ways).

Conker's BFD came at a time when Rare was clearly in decline, so when it came out in 2001, it was a big surprise at its originality and high quality. I think many were expecting something like Banjo Tooie or DK64, but this was WAY fresher and WAY better. It's a bit like a platformer meets an action-adventure game. The multiplayer was also something different than others, it was weird... it felt like a high-quality thing that was kind of tacked on. I think it's like the Sonic 2 time trials, it ended up being WAY more fun than I felt it should have been.

For me it is a toss up between Jet Force Gemini, Banjo Kazooie, and Donky Kong 64.

I am giving the nod to Jet Force Gemini as I feel that is an IP that had a ton of untapped potential should they have taken it beyond a single game.

It's hard for me to judge Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark as I never got to experience them in their heyday; games featuring realistic violence against humans were strictly forbidden in our household when I was growing up.

I did eventually check them out as an adult, but by then they had aged rather poorly in terms of controls and framerate. I can see how they would've been impressive in the N64 era, but by contrast, Banjo Kazooie still feels very playable to me to this day.

Very nice household rule. Commends to your parents/guardians/tutors. (:

Thanks. If I'm ever to become a parent I think it's one I will enforce as well.

Fantasy/sci-fi violence like in Zelda or Star Wars games was fine, it was just the realistic stuff they restricted, at least until we were adults, then we could buy what we wanted.