Overall, Pokemon Stadium 2 was just an incredibly welcome addition for Pokemon fans on the Nintendo 64. The 12 new mini-games and quiz mode provided hours of entertainment with friends, and new to Pokemon Stadium 2, the Pokemon Academy was like a built-in strategy guide that taught useful tactics with tests in the form of actual Pokemon battles. The transfer pak for the Nintendo 64 controller allowed you to battle with your own Pokemon from the GameBoy Color games in the Gym Leader Castle and most of the tournaments in the Stadium, see 3D Pokemon models at the Lab, play the Pokemon GameBoy games at double or triple speed once you unlocked the Doduo or Dodrio modes, and more. Like the original Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Stadium 2 did not have a story of its own, but provided an awesome expansion of sorts to Pokemon Trainers with Pokemon Gold, Silver, or Crystal on the GameBoy Color. But Tooie’s platforming, augmented by goofy transformations and endless new moves, was refined compared to DK64, and its explorable areas dwarfed Conker, giving it the edge. In addition to picking up right where Kazooie left off, Banjo Tooie was also a continuation of Kazooie in another creative way: While the original plans to link the cartridges by physically swapping them back and forth in the N64 was nixed by Nintendo, unexplained mysteries from the first game including very well-hidden, literal Easter eggs and the bafflingly inaccessible Ice Key did make appearances in Tooie, and helped the pair of games feel like one adventure.īanjo-Tooie was up against some beloved platformers in our selection process including Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Donkey Kong 64, both from Tooie’s developer, Rare. The followup to Banjo-Kazooie expanded on what made the first great, adding 8 more gorgeous (if stuttery on the Nintendo 64) levels to keep the collecta-a-thon going while not shaking things up too much. There are just too many greats to fit into a list of 25.įinally, one last note, because our staff is mostly made up of people who played Nintendo 64 games released only in North America, we decided to keep this list import free. Honorable mentions include Conker's Bad Fur Day, Mario Party 2, Excitebike 64, Pilotwings 64, Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Mario Tennis, Turok, Wrestlemania, No Mercy, BattleTanx, Episode I: Racer, Snowboard Kids, Mischief Makers, ISS98, and many, many more. The games toward the top of this list are the ones that we feel have the best combination of those three criteria, while the ones towards the bottom, or the ones that didn't make the cut, might be strong in one of those aspects, but lacking in the others. Second, we tried to consider a number of factors, including historical significance, how good it looked and played at the time, in addition to how well it holds up today, y’know, just in case you’re still able to dig your old N64 out of the closet.

First, while we didn't have a hard rule on only including games that were exclusive to the Nintendo 64, we also didn’t want to include games that are just simply better on other platforms of that era, like Resident Evil 2 and Rayman 2.

As always with any kind of list like this, it’s important to establish our criteria to explain as best as we can why some games made the list and others didn’t.

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