I think the winner of the genre certainly has to be Goldeneye – that’s certainly what came blazing into my brain before I opened this thread. That game was just a mega-success and had no real right to be. (A movie tie-in has, since the colossal disaster of E.T. on Atari 2600, historically been video game company code for “crappy, buggy game with little or nothing to do with the actual movie but will sell based on name recognition”. Of course, there have always been exceptions, like NES’ Goonies II, but for every one of those, there’s a lot more nasty ones.) Things are getting better, but then, I would say we’ve had a lot of across-the-board improvement since PCs and multiple consoles have had to compete so roughly for the growing audience.
Rogue Leader is, however, the best game I’ve seen in terms of being true to the film. (Goldeneye the game didn’t have the same ‘feel’ as the film – though it did have the same main character and basic plot. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as Goldeneye the game was a much greater success in its field than the movie.) Part of this is simply modern graphic capability – damn, some of those battles are just beautiful. I’ve only seen it played on a huge projector screen, though, so I may be a bit biased towards it, but hot dang.