Yeah the Timesplitters games were great; (though I'd agree time hasn't been kind) not that this helped Gamecube though as they were multiplatform.

Nintendo definitely needed some kind of "cool" heavy hitter, they just never managed to really land one that gen, though not for lack of trying.

The damning thing about the 007 situation is I believe Danjaq/MGM (the company that owns the Bond rights) gave Nintendo first right of refusal to get the rights for future games and Yamauchi I believe was even going to do it but Rareware talked him out of it.

Pretty classic example of shooting yourself in the foot. When you have a success like that, stop overthinking it and just acknowledge you've hit on something bigger than yourself and get out of your own way. If Nintendo had secured the Bond rights, likely Rareware is never sold away in the first place and left to rot at Microsoft, so they really screwed over the entire studio. They would have be far better off under Nintendo.

Funny because it's true.  

Goldeneye via emulation is still a good game, especially with remapped controls and steady frame rate. 

To be fair, Rare wanted to take the lessons they had learned from Goldeneye and create an intellectual property that they'd own the full rights to. It's just that the plan went a bit south when the Goldeneye team broke away from the company to create their own IP.

But yeah, Perfect Dark had a huge hype train about it when it was released. Maybe it would have lost a little steam in the Gamecube era (in a hypothetical timeline where Rare didn't get sold to Microsoft), but a Rare-developed Perfect Dark game for the Wii could have been a major hit if they'd gotten the motion controls right.

Yep I understand but it was kind of a dumb idea to think you could create a character anywhere near Bond. Yamauchi should have just told them they're working on the next Bond game and that's that. 

I don't want to belabor that point but I feel like this hurt the GameCube more than things people fixate on like the mini-DVD. The mini-DVD really didn't stop any major game from being on the GameCube, you could just press an extra disk no problem and by the early 2000s there was far better compression methods than in the N64 era. You could use high bite rate MP3 to compress audio files to a fraction of the size and there was much better video compression like MPEG-4 if you really needed for whatever reason to cap out at 3 disks max.

MPEG-4 could compress your standard MPEG-2 DVD quality video of the early 2000s by a 5x compression rate, so that effectively meant a GameCube disk could store as much FMV as any full size disk game just by using a different compression format and the quality difference really wouldn't be that big of a deal. Especially at that time, we're talking about most people owning SD 480i resolution 27" inch tube TVs or smaller in most cases. I believe even better MP4 compression was even available by 2002 which would compress that file size even moreso. 

EDIT: I looked this up and apparently FFX on PS2 was 4.2 GB total but most of that file size was uncompressed video FMV and voice data, the actual game itself was 900MB only, remember there are no HD textures this is the SD era actual game data didn't take up that much space. You could have likely easily used MPEG-4 compression on the video files and reduced the audio files significantly even with the compression methods available circa 2001/2002 and put this game on the GameCube without much problem. Maybe it would be a 2 disc game, but that's not exactly a big deal. 

The reason that game didn't come to the GameCube was because Sony paid them an exclusivity deal to keep it off other platforms, simple as that.

Losing Bond and replacing it with things like Metroid Prime and Geist was a monstrous downgrade, it's one of the big reasons the GameCube sold less than the N64, N64 sold a lot of systems by having that element of being the FPS/shooter console. They just gave that away with no real fight. Again it would be like trying to replace Mario with like Chibi Robo or if that's too extreme, maybe Kirby. If the Switch 2 had only Kirby games and no Mario games, it would suffer a huge decline in sales from the Switch 1. 

Gamecube, Playstation 2, Original Xbox did not support MPEG-4 video decoding natively in hardware.
MPEG-1/MPEG-2 is the standard.

Xbox 360, Playstation 3 had hardware MPEG-4 support in their video decoders. (Wii missed out.)

All these consoles could do it in software however... With caveats. - But that would compromise other parts of running a 3D game.

So no... It's not as simple as "Lets use MPEG-4".

GameCube did support DiVX which is basically a MPEG-4 variant, Rogue Squadron III used it for its FMV so did other GameCube games. 

Again. It didn't support it in hardware. That is all done in software.
No point even trying to argue with me on this point with my low-level understanding of the hardware.

The biggest issue with the GC was the hardware was weaker than the xbox by a good margin, and the lineup was vastly inferior to the ps2. The GC didnt stand out, other than looking like a cheap lunchbox.

The ps2 has one of the greatest exclusive lineups of all time between DMC, FF, Jak, Sly, god, gta, colossus, dragon quest, mgs, silent hill, etc.  KH, ace combat, ape escape, GT, etc, etc.

What does it matter whether it was software side or dedicated hardware, it was even part of the official GameCube SDK (dev kits). The point is it could be done, if Squaresoft wanted the game on the GameCube it would have been fairly easy to put it onto 2 discs. The biggest space hog on FFX was actually the voice acting (which was awful lol), they used up more space on that than even the video did. That could have also been easily compressed. 

The games of that era were still low res 480i/p games, they didn't use up much data, FMV and uncompressed audio is what would eat up disc space but by 2001 there were tons of compression techniques available. My junk family laptop that had junk specs could run MPEG-4 video files in those days without much fuss.