Cool get on the magazines, Khush! I threw most of my old gaming mags out many years ago, sadly, but a few survived the cull. A few from N64 times, and one or two from the GC era. I've still never played beyond the beginning in Hybrid Heaven, which one of the mags touted as the N64 response to Metal Gear Solid (related: remember how much hype there was for Mission Impossible on N64, and WinBack?).
I don't remember much hype for those games but I was still young then and there wasn't really a source for gaming news that I had back then. Plus, didn't get the N64 until around 1999. I also found myself getting disinterested in gaming a bit at that time. It was the Cube (and it's blessed controller) that really got me back into gaming. It was that perfect of soon graduating high school and then working and getting more self-income to buy games while still living at home so I still had the free time to play the games I was beginning to acquire. It caused me to go back and buy some SNES and N64 games from eBay and go back to those systems a bit but GameCube became most of my focus and then it spread from there of buying games through the years and building up a collection.
That said, I do remember seeing the Mission Impossible box / game at Blockbuster for rent when I'd go but never thought of actually playing it. Probably didn't help that the box was a pretty plain/generic looking cover. I'm not sure I've ever heard of WinBack until now. What I have noticed in flipping through some of the late N64 issues I've got (140 - 145) range is how much of a push The World is Not Enough seemed to get. Obviously, the game was hoping to catch some of that GoldenEye popularity and keep Bond as a popular gaming icon/franchise. However, it was released after Perfect Dark had come out a few months before and on the end of the 64's life with the GameCube soon about to launch making it look a bit obsolete. Bond has never been able to get back to that GoldenEye high and has tried to reboot it twice now with GoldenEye Rogue Agent (or something like that during the later Cube period) and then again during the Wii years. Both failed.
That Nintendo Power collection is dope as ****. A friend of mine with an absolutely massive game collection (I think he said about 5,400 games last time I asked) has every issue.
My week has just been flipping though and taking in wave after wave of nostalgia. While the collector in me likes the idea of a complete collection, I'm not motivated to spend the money it might take to pull that off. Like I say, I'm just going to hope for a chance to fill in those GameCube years and probably leave it at that. Still, that is a massive game collection. I mean, I don't have a tenth of that. All though I might be getting close to a tenth these days but still. That is crazy. I still buy games with the misguided hope of someday playing them and not just to display them.
UncleBob's got to have a complete Nintendo Power collection, thought, right?