finalark
SNORLAX
Link to original post: [drupal=2371]Game Cube Retrospect[/drupal]
There was once a young boy who saved up every last penny he had for months and months on end, just so he could buy Nintendo's little purple box called the Game Cube. One day, this boy got lucky, for a local K Mart that was destined to be turned into a Lowe's in the near future was going out of business, and because of this everything in the store was 60% off. So this boy had not only enough money for a Game Cube (A black one, which is easily twice as cool as a purple one) but also had enough for a memory card, a second controller and two games called Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Party 4.
If it hasn't become obvious, that boy was me. And that's my little story behind the Game Cube, Nintendo's most underrated system. It's a strange thing, the life of the Game Cube, it's pretty much the PS3 of last gen in the sense that people hated on it for ignorant, arrogant, or sometimes even down right stupid reasons. Some of the ones that I remember from those days are "its disks are dumb," "it can't go online (YES IT CAN)", or one that really pissed me off the most, "It can't play DvDs." Basically, it all sums up to "it wasn't the Play Station 2, so it must have sucked." Really, that's just... stupid, putting it bluntly, and this is coming from a guy who had the Game Cube as his first Nintendo system, baring hand-helds. The Game Cube was incredible for several reasons, so let's look over those, or rather, lets take a look at what ultimately makes a system: the games.
No matter which way you look at it, the Game Cube had an awesome library of games. Many of the games were excellent (and often superior) successors to classic Nintendo 64 titles. The console also has some great new(-ish, some of them) series and games that it introduced such as Metroid Prime, Luigi's Mansion, and although I really wasn't a big fan of it, Pikmin, to name a few. Although they did have a few muck-ups that are worth mentioning, like how the Mario Party series started to go down hill on the Game Cube, and the fact that there was a completely missed opportunity for a new series when they decided to turn what was then called Dinosaur Planet into a Star Fox game. But still, there were great games on the system, despite a few mistakes on Nintendo's behalf. One game that really changed the way I looked at gaming was Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, why this game wasn't very successful is beyond me. This was the game that reminded me that games aren't always about having great narrative, sound track, design, ect. This was the game that reminded me why I got into gaming in the first place: to have some fun. The game had no story, no real artistic design, or anything that most people would judge a game by. The game was just pure, classic, fun. Whenever I show people this game they some times ask "why didn't this do better," to which I reply, "Well, did you buy a copy?"
And while I'm on the topic of noteworthy titles, I'm going to make this more readable by writing a few new paragraphs devoted to them. I'm going to give a brief mention of this one, because I've never played it, but there was a game called Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem that, from what I've heard, seriously knew how to mess with your head. Because I've never played it, I can only go off of what I've heard, but from what I know the game uses psychological horror (the scariest kind of horror) to mess with the head of not only your character, but the player too. Apparently, the game would cause your sound to cut out, your controls to sometimes not work right, or wost of all, pretend to corrupt your data. Now that's just evil.
Now one game that a lot of people hated for some really... strange reason was Star Fox Assault. It's probably because most people compare it to its predecessor, Star Fox 64, although I don't see why that would make you hate it, seeing how Star Fox Assault was better than Star Fox 64 in every single way (ducks). But seriously, Star Fox Assault really was a great game, the space battles were awesome, the on-foot parts were pretty interesting, and the Land Master bits... okay, admittedly, I was never a fan of the Land Master parts. But they made up for it with some fun (although often imbalanced) multiplayer, a soundtrack to suit the game's epic theme, and a storyline that ripped of the Borg saga from Star Trek as much as possible. Star Fox Assult is one of those games that people hate, and I always scratch my head and ask "why?"
Another title that's worth mentioning is Kirby Air Ride. This was the ultimate party game, it was easy to pick up and a load of fun to play. The main reason why it was so easy to pick up was because it only used the control stick and "A" button, making it a perfect example of the classic "easy to learn hard to master" thing. The game had three modes, a mode where you just kind of go a few laps around a track, another mode that I rarely played called Top-Ride, which was kind of like those old race track things where you just hold down a button to make it go I guess, but the one that I remember the most was City Trail. For the longest time, I'd just invite three buddies over and that's all we'd do all night is play City Trial. This mode was where they plopped you and your friends into a city and told you to go around looking for power-ups to boost your machine. There were also several events that would happen, like Dynablade showing up and causing some havoc. In the end, you and your friends would be forced to either fight each other or work together in a random challenge. One that really gained infamy among my little gaming group was the DeDeDe battle. Seriously, we could never get this guy down, there's probabbly some trick to it but we never found it out. So Kirby Air Ride, if you own a Game Cube or a Wii and you're going to have a game party soon, go hunt this one down. It's well worth your time and money.
F-Zero GX. HELL YEAH! This game kicked some serious ***, and manged to be better than F-Zero X (ducks) at the same time. I normally do not like racing games at all, but you know a game is good if it can break this rule (should have mentioned that back in Kirby Air Ride). A lot of love was put into this one, each racer has his her own very unique and usually pretty good theme song, all of the tracks are really nice to look at and are a load of fun to race on. Although I will admit that some of the missions in story mode can feel somewhat punishingly hard, the custom car system really isn't anything to write home about, but those few things aside, F-Zero GX really is a great game, why Nintendo doesn't do more with this series is just confusing.
So lets step away from the racing and the sci-fi and embrace swords and sorcery with Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Fire Emblem kind of had a brief burst of popularity in the west after they FINALLY localized the series with some game boy titles. But Radiant Dawn deserves being mentioned for being not only a great game in its own right, but also being the first Fire Emblem on a home system in years. The story was your typical Fire Emblem story, some big scary Empire is being a jerk and trying to take over the good guy's kingdom so the good guys have to go beat them all up. And yes it was a load of fun, as usual, although I've actually fond the game funner when you have someone else watching you play it. Giving you tactical advice and such, if you have someone smart you should all go try that sometime.
Well, this pretty much became one big hats-off to some great Game Cube games. I'd write more, but I'm afraid if I did it would scare everyone off with its length. There are a load of great games that I'd love to devote a little paragraph to, but my fingers are getting really tired and may fall off at any second. Some some other honorable mentions include: The Legend of Zelda: The Winder Waker, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Pokemon Colosseum, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, Geist (based off of what I've head, I really wish I could find this game), Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and probably a billion other games I'll be flamed for for not mentioning. So I'll close by saying this, we may never know why the Game Cube was a hated system, but it was a system that turned me into a Nintendo fan. So to all of you who sat through this, I hope this brought as many memories back to you as it did to me.
There was once a young boy who saved up every last penny he had for months and months on end, just so he could buy Nintendo's little purple box called the Game Cube. One day, this boy got lucky, for a local K Mart that was destined to be turned into a Lowe's in the near future was going out of business, and because of this everything in the store was 60% off. So this boy had not only enough money for a Game Cube (A black one, which is easily twice as cool as a purple one) but also had enough for a memory card, a second controller and two games called Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Party 4.
If it hasn't become obvious, that boy was me. And that's my little story behind the Game Cube, Nintendo's most underrated system. It's a strange thing, the life of the Game Cube, it's pretty much the PS3 of last gen in the sense that people hated on it for ignorant, arrogant, or sometimes even down right stupid reasons. Some of the ones that I remember from those days are "its disks are dumb," "it can't go online (YES IT CAN)", or one that really pissed me off the most, "It can't play DvDs." Basically, it all sums up to "it wasn't the Play Station 2, so it must have sucked." Really, that's just... stupid, putting it bluntly, and this is coming from a guy who had the Game Cube as his first Nintendo system, baring hand-helds. The Game Cube was incredible for several reasons, so let's look over those, or rather, lets take a look at what ultimately makes a system: the games.
No matter which way you look at it, the Game Cube had an awesome library of games. Many of the games were excellent (and often superior) successors to classic Nintendo 64 titles. The console also has some great new(-ish, some of them) series and games that it introduced such as Metroid Prime, Luigi's Mansion, and although I really wasn't a big fan of it, Pikmin, to name a few. Although they did have a few muck-ups that are worth mentioning, like how the Mario Party series started to go down hill on the Game Cube, and the fact that there was a completely missed opportunity for a new series when they decided to turn what was then called Dinosaur Planet into a Star Fox game. But still, there were great games on the system, despite a few mistakes on Nintendo's behalf. One game that really changed the way I looked at gaming was Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, why this game wasn't very successful is beyond me. This was the game that reminded me that games aren't always about having great narrative, sound track, design, ect. This was the game that reminded me why I got into gaming in the first place: to have some fun. The game had no story, no real artistic design, or anything that most people would judge a game by. The game was just pure, classic, fun. Whenever I show people this game they some times ask "why didn't this do better," to which I reply, "Well, did you buy a copy?"
And while I'm on the topic of noteworthy titles, I'm going to make this more readable by writing a few new paragraphs devoted to them. I'm going to give a brief mention of this one, because I've never played it, but there was a game called Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem that, from what I've heard, seriously knew how to mess with your head. Because I've never played it, I can only go off of what I've heard, but from what I know the game uses psychological horror (the scariest kind of horror) to mess with the head of not only your character, but the player too. Apparently, the game would cause your sound to cut out, your controls to sometimes not work right, or wost of all, pretend to corrupt your data. Now that's just evil.
Now one game that a lot of people hated for some really... strange reason was Star Fox Assault. It's probably because most people compare it to its predecessor, Star Fox 64, although I don't see why that would make you hate it, seeing how Star Fox Assault was better than Star Fox 64 in every single way (ducks). But seriously, Star Fox Assault really was a great game, the space battles were awesome, the on-foot parts were pretty interesting, and the Land Master bits... okay, admittedly, I was never a fan of the Land Master parts. But they made up for it with some fun (although often imbalanced) multiplayer, a soundtrack to suit the game's epic theme, and a storyline that ripped of the Borg saga from Star Trek as much as possible. Star Fox Assult is one of those games that people hate, and I always scratch my head and ask "why?"
Another title that's worth mentioning is Kirby Air Ride. This was the ultimate party game, it was easy to pick up and a load of fun to play. The main reason why it was so easy to pick up was because it only used the control stick and "A" button, making it a perfect example of the classic "easy to learn hard to master" thing. The game had three modes, a mode where you just kind of go a few laps around a track, another mode that I rarely played called Top-Ride, which was kind of like those old race track things where you just hold down a button to make it go I guess, but the one that I remember the most was City Trail. For the longest time, I'd just invite three buddies over and that's all we'd do all night is play City Trial. This mode was where they plopped you and your friends into a city and told you to go around looking for power-ups to boost your machine. There were also several events that would happen, like Dynablade showing up and causing some havoc. In the end, you and your friends would be forced to either fight each other or work together in a random challenge. One that really gained infamy among my little gaming group was the DeDeDe battle. Seriously, we could never get this guy down, there's probabbly some trick to it but we never found it out. So Kirby Air Ride, if you own a Game Cube or a Wii and you're going to have a game party soon, go hunt this one down. It's well worth your time and money.
F-Zero GX. HELL YEAH! This game kicked some serious ***, and manged to be better than F-Zero X (ducks) at the same time. I normally do not like racing games at all, but you know a game is good if it can break this rule (should have mentioned that back in Kirby Air Ride). A lot of love was put into this one, each racer has his her own very unique and usually pretty good theme song, all of the tracks are really nice to look at and are a load of fun to race on. Although I will admit that some of the missions in story mode can feel somewhat punishingly hard, the custom car system really isn't anything to write home about, but those few things aside, F-Zero GX really is a great game, why Nintendo doesn't do more with this series is just confusing.
So lets step away from the racing and the sci-fi and embrace swords and sorcery with Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Fire Emblem kind of had a brief burst of popularity in the west after they FINALLY localized the series with some game boy titles. But Radiant Dawn deserves being mentioned for being not only a great game in its own right, but also being the first Fire Emblem on a home system in years. The story was your typical Fire Emblem story, some big scary Empire is being a jerk and trying to take over the good guy's kingdom so the good guys have to go beat them all up. And yes it was a load of fun, as usual, although I've actually fond the game funner when you have someone else watching you play it. Giving you tactical advice and such, if you have someone smart you should all go try that sometime.
Well, this pretty much became one big hats-off to some great Game Cube games. I'd write more, but I'm afraid if I did it would scare everyone off with its length. There are a load of great games that I'd love to devote a little paragraph to, but my fingers are getting really tired and may fall off at any second. Some some other honorable mentions include: The Legend of Zelda: The Winder Waker, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Pokemon Colosseum, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, Geist (based off of what I've head, I really wish I could find this game), Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and probably a billion other games I'll be flamed for for not mentioning. So I'll close by saying this, we may never know why the Game Cube was a hated system, but it was a system that turned me into a Nintendo fan. So to all of you who sat through this, I hope this brought as many memories back to you as it did to me.
