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No GoldenEye For Xbox Live
Joystiq reports that, as revealed on a recent VGM podcast, GoldenEye is not likely coming to Xbox Live anytime soon. From the article: "I would say is that as far as I know we don't have plans to bring those types of games on Xbox Live Arcade ... Some of the games that were ... on the N64, those games were pretty large and are still gonna be pretty hard to distribute digitally depending on the title."
EA owns the current Goldeneye/Bond license, not Microsoft or Rare. So, to publish Goldeneye on Xbox Live, Microsoft would have to deal with EA which they clearly do not want to do. It's too bad; I'm sure Goldeneye on Xbox live would be a monster seller. I don't think space limitations are the issue, the biggest N64 games were 65 megabytes.
I think even if you look at what Nintendo's planning on doing in this space ... it's 8- and 16-bit games, it's not 32- and 64-bit games.
Actually, Nintendo has already stated that N64 games will be part of this, so bzzt - wrong answer.
And anyway, the ROMs themselves aren't that big. 16 MB tops if I remember correctly. I'm sure Nintendo could set this up in such a way that, assuming the entire game image isn't downloaded before execution, the critical components are downloaded first and then the remainder streamed as the user plays the game. Of course, Nintendo does pride itself on presentation quality, so my best guess is that they'd force a complete download before execution, so that a network service interruption doesn't cause the game to crash or pause because the download stalled.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
The size issue is pretty lame. When you have a service like Live delivering HD trailers at hundreds of MB in size, I would think a rom cartridge from the N64 would be a piece of cake. Case in point is Goldeneye. 96Mbits. That's only 12MB of disk space. If you make multiple copies of that on the 13GB partition, you would have over 1000 copies. To be fair, though, games like Smash TV are about 6Mbit in size so it would be larger than that.
It doesn't matter who owns Rare. The games that were published by Nintendo are (partly) retained by Nintendo. That includes the games I listed above - which for the most part are Rare's most popular games.
Some games, such as Conker and Jet Force Gemini, were published by Rare. This is why M$ gets full rights to these games.
The flip side is that Nintendo can't release those Rare games either. They will only exist "as-is" unless more negotiations take place. I doubt any of the parties will bend on this.