Be Excellent To Each Other

Remember the GameCube? It was like a proto-Wii, without the motion controls. And (often) purple.

I think it has been neglected by history. I mean, really, it wasn't that bad. Certainly better than the Dreamcast. It had some really good games, which we should list and discuss.

Mario Kart Double Dash is superb. For my money, one of the better Mario Karts, if not the best. Unfortunately due to limitations of technology it doesn't have the online play of the later Mario Kart Wii, but what there is is massively enjoyable.

Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is the most beautiful game ever, from a visual point of view. Unfortunately padded-out too much with sailing and has a tedious boss rush at the end, but you can't deny that it's a rather excellent action JRPG.

More GC memories and recommendations please.

Eternal Darkness. The best Resident Evil game apart from RE4 (which is also great)

I got a cube in mid 2004, I fucking love it, my Wii exists to act as a substitute cube as I'd sooner not wear out my old one. I love Double Dash too, and I don't miss the online element - Wii's implementation removes all the joy for me compared to XBox Live. Mario Kart is for playing against someone sat next to you. As is Mario Golf.

You can't fault Metroid Prime for its day, the three Zeldas (Windwaker, Twilight Princess and Four Swords) are a great selection, Pikmin is a cracking original IP and Donkey Konga a fun, affordable early entry in the modern music game hall of fame. Then there's curveballs like Doshin, Animal Crossing and Luigi's Mansion, the tough-as-nails racers Wave Race and F-Zero GX. A proper gamer's console, this is.

I love the third party stuff as well - Viewtiful Joe, Beyond Good and Evil, PN03, SSX3, Rogue Squadron, Ikaruga, Billy Hatcher, Eternal Darkness - all a joy. Resi 4!

That's before I get onto the Wavebird, GBA adapter and GBA link cable in games like Rogue squadron and Zelda. I just totally heart the Gamecube.

Resi 4 got the best of my GameCube. When it was over it went into its drawer and never came out. Weep.

P.N. 03, which should be dirt cheap; I got mine for £2. Ignore what you may have read - it's a 3D game with an emphasis on the development of reflexes and the honing of skills, which gives it a very '2D' feel, which most professional reviewers didn't seem to understand. It's a high-score game. Both Viewtiful Joe games are ace, too, although a lot of people are initially turned off by the difficulty, so try to find 'em on the cheap and then stick with 'em for a while!

If you've got a Freeloader disc, you could also check out the two Mega Man collections, Alien Hominid and Shikigami no Shiro II. The latter comes in a nicely-presented box with a toy cat inside!

Wasn't that bad?!

Favourite (home) console of the generation.

Wind Waker, Prince of Persia: Sands of TIme, Gotcha Force, Ikaruga, Mario Kart Double Dash, Animal Crossing, Donkey Konga Jungle Beat (And Konga), RoboChibi, Resident Evil 4 and Pikmin. And they are just off the top off my head.

EDIT: Fuck, yeah - Viewtiful Joe 1 is sublime.

One of the best joysticks of all time.

All in a cute, tiny box.

You lost me here.

In all seriousness though, the Gamecube was a great console. Everyone's already mentioned Resi 4 but it really was great. Billy Hatcher was also awesome and Luigi's mansion is such a charming game it's untrue!

My most favourite Gamecube game ever has to be Pacman Vs. It came free with R: Racing and was well worth buying a Gameboy, 3 pads and getting 3 people around to play it with you.

Pure genius.

I have a gamecube and a stack of games I am trying to sell actually if anyone is interested.

Games


Sealed copy of Odama + Mic too actually, I accidentally bought it twice. I wonder if that is worth anything.

Shame about Mario. He never really got a good outing on the cube. Don't forget Burnout. The original was out on cube and was amazing.

I have stacks of NTSC (US and Japanese) of GameCube discs which I currently can't play as my Wii is PAL.

More memories...

Metroid Prime was astonishing. Was just a good a transition of a 2D franchise into 3D just as Ocarina of Time was a generation before. Really engrossing game, too. Arguably the better game of the trilogy, although MP3's controls and streamlined gameplay improvement on the first game.

Luigi's Mansion is sadly over-looked. Would've been great as a pack-in game, where the relatively short length would not have been such an issue. Charmingly memorable, and at times feels almost like a quirky British 8-bit game, in a good way.

Animal Crossing! It's heart-warming how it went from a game that nerds with imported GCs swore by, to being advertised on television towards feminine female people in its DS and Wii incarnations. Not sure which Animal Crossing is the best – concept works better on a handheld, but the DS game is cut-down, and the Wii one has (limited) online play but without some of the excellent features of the original – but if you like the franchise in any shape or form you should play the original if you get the chance.

Sonic Mega Collection. A compilation of emulated games, but not a rip-off like the Virtual Console. Like a precursor to the Mega Drive Ultimate Collection on the Xbox 360 and PS3, and useful for reminding yourself that the classic Sonic series wasn't that good after all.

The Gamecube was a lovely system, but Double-Dash is - by a huge margin - the worst Mario Kart game ever made. It's a fucking hateful piece of shit.

I bought a gamecube because of Super Monkey Ball. Eternal Darkness was ace. P.N.0.3. was stylish and cool. Resident Evil looked very nice but was still just Resident Evil again so suffered from the tiresome backtracking. But that's about it for good GC games.

Sunshine was a pleasant distraction. Luigi's Mansion was dull. Monkey Ball 2 had great mini games but they ruined the main game by making it more about pressing forward at the right time than careful analogue control. Mystic Heroes was kind of Dynasty Warriors for kids but felt kind of frustratingly weak.

Lost Kingdoms was fairly fun though I guess but still a bit on the forgettable side. ed

The Dreamcast wasn't much better mind you. There's only about 5 games worth playing on that, classic as they often are. Shenmue was a load of rubbish really wasn't it? It was vastly overrated but that didn't stop it being a pretty immersive experience.

The Saturn on the other hand had some phenomenal classics. Only a handful but they shone brighter than anything on the aforementioned systems.

So there you have it. The DEFINITIVE 'Which failed console is best'.

Yeah I enjoyed the gamecube but I'm still waiting for the new Pilot Wings game I was promised.

Yeah what the fuck was up with that? PW64 was absolutely stonking and they followed it up with nothing

The gamecube was my favoured console of the last generation, and the xbox the worst. If I'd told you that I'd actually dislike the next Nintendo console, and massively prefer the Microsoft one, I would've been slightly incredulous.

Metroid Prime was an utterly fantastic explore em up, which sadly the sequels couldn't touch. Pikmin was excellent. Zelda: Wind Waker was utterly charming (and my first Zelda - althought the Zelda collection was rather excellent too, Zelda 2 aside.

While the PS2 may also have had some similary excellent games (Ico, Shadow of the colossus, FFX) it's controller is a horrible RSI inducing pain generating device.
The XBox had a quite unispiring line up, Halo aside (mainly due to the reintroduction of coop modes to games, which had gone missing for years.) The other two games for it I loved - Psychonauts and Timesplitters 3 - were also available for the PS2, but massively inferior.

I've always thought they've really missed the boat with no Wii Pilotwings with beautiful tilt-controls, gently guiding your hang-glider over to the next thermal.

Oh the possibilities would be endless man. Here you have a flight sim that doesn't take itself too seriously on a console that doesn't take itself too seriously. The motion controller could be used in so many wicked and wonderful ways without upsetting true flight sim fans that it just makes the mind boggle.

Nintendo need to revive what made them. They didn't do an Excite Bike on GC either and Super Soccer and Super Tennis were miles from it too (given that both were done on N64 in the way of Mario based games).

Oh, and Mario Golf TT FTW. I bloody loved it.

Everybody should play Baten Kaitos 1 and 2. They are RPGs with a card-game based battle system. In addition to being awesome, they are also rather good.

But got boring very quickly. at least for me.

The only classics that i can think of are Metroid Prime, RE4 and Wind Waker. I thought super mario sunshine to be incredibly shit.

And the PoP games look so much worse than on the PC that the whole fairytale atmosphere goes off.

Sunshine is indeed rubbish.

At least Sunshine has those proto-Galaxy bits.

Also, Jungle Beat is so fucking good. Y'all owe it to yourselves to play that.

They can't repeat PilotWings, cos it was by 'Paradigm' of Dallas, Texas, who got bought out by Infogrames (sorry 'Atari') and promptly driven into the ground, broken up, and the burnt remains danced upon in a strange gallic ritual - much like Ocean, Gremlin, Atari, Melbourne House, Reflections, and others too numerous to mention.
Therefore, the rights to it currently rest in the hands of 'New Atari'.

Let me put it like this...
Reflections made 'Driver', 'Atari' made 'Driv3r'...

So, do you still want a sequel?

Surely nonsense. Nintendo made Pilotwings on the SNES - it's their intellectual property, regardless if they co-developed Pilotwings 64 with another company.

That would be like Microsoft owning the rights to Donkey Kong because they bought Rare.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Nintendo own the IP. It's a big Nintendoiness Nintendo.

I've actually been suspecting for some time that they are keeping Pilotwings back for the next machine- possibly as a bundle, especially as they've already used up the Wii Sports sequelness. Plus it'd be a great way to win back the old gamers who feel a bit let down with all the vaccuous bollocks whilst still keeping the new people interested.

It'll be all lovely in HD and stuff.

It'd take much more than pilotwings to win me back.

Not least because I've never played it.

I don't think anything would sell me on a new nintendo console if I thought it was going to turn out like the wii.

Or Camelot owning Mario because they did some sports games with him in.

Hmm, I can't really see why flying a plane using motion controls would be any more fun than driving a car with them.

Not even if it came with game about crap horses that could drive sports cars based in the Warhammer 40k universe that was controlled via a drum kit?

Eternal Darkness is one of my favoritest games ever.
I also recommend the multiplayer bits of Super Monkey Ball, and Pikmin.

Wind Waker was lovely.

We had a lot of fun out of multiplayer Bomberman Generation.

I'm just trying to think of what else I really enjoyed on the cube.... Um.... Smash Bros was OK for a bit, the Monkey Ball Gliding thing was fun.... I think that's it.

I loved Smash Bros on the Cube. The Wii version is good too but it feels like more of the same. Wind Waker looked fantastic but as with all the other Zeldas, I got bored and never finished it.

I think after Smash Bros and Monkey Ball, my most played game on the Cube would have been.... Mat Hoffman Pro BMX 2. It's buggy in places (you'd sometimes fall through the floor of the level and it would occasionally lock up completely in the menus) but I love it.

i recently looked at my GC collection, and except pikmin 2 and SMB1 there wasn't really anything i wanted to play
(ikaruga, smash bros and sports titles all supoerceded)

my son loves mario golf though, which is really nice

Mario Golf is just the poor mans Sensible Golf.

FTFY

Wow, F-Zero GX had F-Zero AX (the arcade game) hidden in it all along! If you have an Action Replay.

http://mynintendonews.com/2013/03/07/f- ... w-to-play/

You can actually unlock all that stuff two other ways without requiring action replay.

Either beat all the other four GPs on all difficulties (I managed this!)

Or take your memory card to an F-Zero AX machine and beat the AX cup using your save, it will then be unlocked when you load it up again on GX.

Edit: This was publicised around release, dunno why these "hackers" are surprised to have found it.

My hatred for Nintendo is so intense that I'm not allowing myself to remember the GameCube.

Wind Waker! I got stuck, years and years ago, on the island where the water has dried up in some bird village. I couldn't figure out at all what to do. Then, a year or so ago, I got a TV with a component in, so I was finally able to use the lead I'd bought a decade earlier. Lovely! Think I must have Gamefaq'd at that point. Got a bit further, but not much.

As much as I adore how the game looks and feels, I don't find it anywhere near as intuitive as the other Zelda games I've played.

Yeah, if the game did exist, I'd say the logic behind some the puzzles wasn't as clear as the earlier games.

That's where this website comes in.

http://strategywiki.org/wiki

It was really handy to get me through Ocarina of Time.

The GameCube... How un-disappointing that was in comparison to all that's come after.

(Seriously guys, the Wii U is terrible. Don't buy one.)

For any particular reason or because there aren't any games for it? I'll probably buy one if there was ever a Metroid Prime 4. Or if the next Zelda is as good as Wind Waker.

The next Zelda is going to be Wind Waker, in HD

Wind Waker and and Link's Awaking are the only two Zelda games I've completed and so have a special place in my heart. I think I would of completed A Link to the Past, but it crashed and I lost a whole load of progress so lost interest. I got bored of Ocarina and Twilight Princess.

I hope the rumours of GameCube games on Wii U come true. Not enough people have played Chibi-Robo!

Or they could make some new games.

Oh, and if there's a new Zelda they better change the bastard format. It needs a proper reboot not just new clothes.

Indeed. But the better change there could be is to remove the stupid hours long tutorials. Wind Waker was already pushing it but Twilight Princess went to far.

That's actually what I was thinking about! Skyward Sword took over ten hours before it let me get going. Stupid fecking lovely shit awesome cunty game that it was.

Nintendo have said that the next Zelda is going to be a major reinvention of the series, which I think it drastically needs.

I guess we'll see.

I have a massive urge to play my Gamecube now. I never completed Luigis Mansion and I think I should get that changed as soon as possible.