Mario Kart (after Warlords on the Atari 2600 or MULE on the Atari 8-bits with 4 players) is my favorite group game. It just has the fun feel, and hearing the various characters screaming or victory yells is hilarious.
That doesn't mean it wasn't fun. It doesn't invalidate the good times we had. But there is so much about that game (from the controller itself, to the control layout, to the gameplay) that just does not hold up. N64 Goldeneye is a clunky, hard to play, unbalanced mess.
It was a ton of fun, and I wouldn't trade the experience of playing it for anything; but it is not a 'masterpiece'.
Mario Kart 64 is, even by modern standards, a good game, but calling that a masterpiece would mean we need to come up with a classification higher than masterpiece for Mario Kart 8.
If you haven't, I recommend checking out the story on Goldeneye!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldenEye_007_(1997_video_game...
I'll stand by it, because later I went on to be a Half-Life and Adrenaline Gamer hardcore player, and HLDM's complexity with the long jump and tau cannon required a lot of study and practice for most. Goldeneye was a good trainer for that.
I maintain that HLDM stands amongst the best of Multiplayer shooters: Up there with Quake, Q3A, CPMA, and UT.
I really don't swear by Q3 or HLDM: Although I do swear at them a lot. My preference is either Quake 1 or Xonotic, which is like Quake meets UT, and lowers the floor on advanced movement so plebs like me don't get totally stomped the first time they log on (we still get stomped, just not impossibly fast).
I love them all, which probably means I'm a masochist or something.
Another masterpiece would be the Megaman 2: It's one of the best platformers out there, and there's been nothing like it before or since.
Especially the version on the Xbox360, or, as I call it, "that big white box I own solely to play Perfect Dark on". A straight port with upgraded graphics, better framerate, modern controls, and (or perhaps this one I'm imagining) subtly rebalanced difficulty to account for those other changes. Nothing like that garbage trying-to-be-Call-of-Duty-and-failing-miserably Goldeneye reimagining a few years back.
Still unmatched in terms of gameplay options. Coop single player, versus(!) single player, the great multiplayer of course. The way the difficulty settings changed objectives and even starting location(!) in addition to damage values and AI. The fun "cheats" you unlock with speedruns. Brilliant game.
Doom is also a good one.
Wow, now that is a great multiplayer game. One of the few video games that my whole family played together (the other being 'Where in Time is Carmen San Diego' for the NES).
Very nice to see it mentioned here! It is a huge classic.
Functionally, it filled the niche that would be occupied by Mario Karts, Goldeneye, M.U.L.E., and Perfect Dark. 4 player head-to-head games that were simple to understand and fun to play repeatedly.