Ghost of Tsuchima is amazing. I love the setting, story, combat. And the world is pure visual bliss. What a stylish game, even minor sidequests often have a unique visual identity, where the devs chose specific weather/lightning/particle conditions to enhance the atmosphere.
And the photomode is done very well, you can seemlessly alter the weather/time/wind(direction) to make the perfect captures. Given that their last game (Second Son), was one of the earlier AAA non-racing games with a prominent photomode, it makes sense that the devs went all in here.
And yeah, Goldeneye is pretty damn bad to play these days. I did enjoy playing the Perfect Dark remaster (360) though, but that one is patched up visually (though still close to the N64 game in terms of overall look) and was given a more modern control scheme. I recently played Doom 64 on the Switch and it is kind of funny how that got bad reviews back in the day because it felt old fashioned, yet that one plays very well still.
Hackers fucking suck. I remember being a kid playing Socom 2 online and then these people come with a damn rocket launcher that shoots like an M60.
I swear this is true... A good friend of mine in high school along with 1 or 2 other people took down that game. I remember him showing me the hacks they were working on before they released it into the wild. My friend was responsible for that automatic rocket launcher you speak of (it could also shoot through terrain). It was nuts. You used to have to physically modify your PS2 to do it. There was stuff in the software that ordered DRM checks based on the opening and closing of the disc drive. You'd have to open your PS2 and swap out discs without opening the drive, and that'd allow you to circumvent the DRM stuff. This was still long before the days of developers being able to push out patches and hot fixes, so once they released it to the world, that game was toast. He was always a wiz with coding and went on to co-found Zynga.
Well, screw him for ruining my childhood then
And yeah, those times were wild. Even the game without any tinkering allowed for some weird glitches that gave you massive advantages, and nothing could really be done about it.