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Console Debate #4: Gamecube


fox

How do you rate the Gamecube?  

57 members have voted

  1. 1. How do you rate the Gamecube?

    • 10/10 GOAT. Greatest console of all time.
    • 9/10 Bad@$$. One of the best.
    • 8/10 Exceptional. Everyone should play it.
    • 7/10 Superior. More than a few games you like.
    • 6/10 Good. You might occasionally enjoy playing it.
    • 5/10 Average. Smack dab in the middle.
    • 4/10 Mediocre. Not something you will go out of your way to play.
    • 3/10 Inferior. There are better alternatives to this.
    • 2/10 Poor. Barely worth turning on.
      0
    • 1/10 Trash. No redeeming features.
      0

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  • Poll closed on 12/04/2020 at 05:59 AM

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7/10. I was pretty satisfied with it at the time but there have been far better libraries.

Pretty solid multiplayer console, with Melee in particular competing fiercely with Halo 1 and 2 for the title of king of 6th gen party games.

For single player Metroid Prime 1 and 2 and RE4 and REmake were fantastic. (RE0 not quite so much). Luigi's Mansion has a ton of charm, though there's not all that much to the actual game. Pikmin was pretty neat and I need to get around to Pikmin 2. Should try Eternal Darkness too. Animal Crossing seemed interesting at the time but I can't really see myself bothering with anything in that franchise again. I still like Twin Snakes even with some issues and at the time it was nice getting to play some of the older Zelda and Resident Evils to go along with the multiplatform Sonic and Mega Man collections.

3D Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox all took steps down, though, especially the latter. No Kirby game besides Air Ride, either. In Mario's case there's not even really much in the way of other 3D platformers to back Sunshine up. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are nostalgic but maybe not quite what you want to advertise your console's highest level of quality, Wario World certainly isn't great, pretty much everything else good is on PS2 and sometimes Xbox?

Tales of Symphonia, Thousand Year Door, Skies of Arcadia, Path of Radiance, and the Baten Kaitos games were cool. Congrats Gamecube, you beat the N64 RPG library.

Seems like there's some good work around the top by Nintendo and Capcom but the former bungled some of their highest profile games, some cool Dreamcast ports the other consoles at the time didn't necessarily get, and a solid selection of multiplatform games (seemingly a lot western stuff I didn't play; though, I have heard bad stuff about the GC versions of Splinter Cell in particular) landed here too.

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To be honest, I forgot what most of the GC games were when reading the thread topic. Looking back, I had this system for a large bulk of my late childhood/teenage years. I did not have a PS2, as I didn't have much for internet access and thought it was just GTA, Madden, and Movie games like FF and MGS. Nor did I have an Xbox, though I did play it at other people's houses. PS2 and Xbox don't stand out much to me at all, but neither does gamecube, and I owned it for almost its entire active lifespan, and aside from games like RE and Eternal Darkness, I basically bought and played all the titles people speak well of, and even ones no one remembers (cubivore was entertaining at least).

Yes, if pressed, I could name 10 games for 'cube that I like and care about, but it mostly just reminds me of massively disappointing mario and zelda games, mario being shoved into everything, and huge game droughts where you're waiting and waiting for something that doesn't feel like a bone being thrown to you. It has an up side, but not in its favor; I spent so much time using it to play NES games in animal crossing that I ended up just outright buying an NES, which incidentally started my favorite part of my gaming youth. So, aside from introducing me to black box NES and to the first Zelda, I don't have much to say for gamecube. 3, maybe 4 out of 10. Basically invalidated by Wii, and I don't care if it's emulation, the Wii emus work better than GB Player anyway.

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bought a GC on launch day. Liked it well enough but never loved it. Eventually i was disgusted at the lack of appealing games coming out for it, so i sold it about 2 years later. I always loved the controller, though.
Favorite games: Smash Bros, Gauntlet Dark Legacy

re-bought a GC about 3 years ago. i've really come around on it, but it's still hard to shake off that initial impression. the library is much better than i initially gave it credit for.

Gave it a 6. My least favorite Nintendo home console by a wide margin.

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10/10

It may have not had some of the most fondly remembered entires into some series (namely Super Mario Sunshine and to a lesser extent Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker) but it had lots of other solid games, and it's ports were still good to boot (Madden 05 is still the only Madden game I've ever actually invested any amount of decent time into, and I played that season mode a lot lol)

Still at least one Nintendo console I like more then it (the SNES) and the GCN on it's own is like a high 9/10, but it gets that extra point for one simply addon alone;

The Game Boy Player

Pretty fond memories from my High School days

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9/10, one of my all-time favorites. Loved almost everything about it since I got one on launch day (I wanted purple, but had to settle for black...). First games were Luigi's Mansion, Rogue Squardron II, and Super Monkey Ball - I think I did all right! Amazing three games, especially RS2 blew me away with the amazing visuals, sound, and most importantly very challenging and satisfying gameplay.

Follow that up with Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game we played combined multiplayer and single player probably thousands upon thousands of hours. Absolutely iconic. Came out less than a month after the system launched! And still played in tournaments to this day.

I've always loved the controller, Gameboy Player, unique small discs, amazing Wavebird wireless controllers, and the slew of great games. It always has outpaced the PS2 and Xbox by a large distance in my view. Only annoying thing is the memory cards!

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On 11/28/2020 at 2:56 AM, peg said:

One of Nintendo's worst consoles, which is really saying something since both the n64 and wii are it's competition. I'd rank it above both of those disasters, but not by much.

3/10

Dude just the Game Boy Player by itself is worth at least a 7/10.  I only wish there was a good way to play DS games on the TV...

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Never vibed with it's oddly placed and shaped button layout on the controller.  Many of the new crop of titles were just too "quirky" (Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion) while the sequels (Mario/Zelda/Kart) didn't live up to previous outings.  Third party support was pretty soft as well, leading to huge droughts where nothing good was released.

Easily Nintendo's weakest console, other than maybe the Wii U.  Not speaking to highly when the best thing you can say about it is there is a cool adapter that plays gameboy games.

F-Zero GX rules though

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This is a hard one for me to rank.  I owned the PS2 from this era, so I don't have any nostalgic memories of this console.  However, after buying one many years later during the PS3/Wii era, I've still have good times playing this console.  The Thousand Year Door is by far my favorite game for the console and I've also enjoyed Twin Snakes and Double Dash.  However, I've never been a fan of the controller.  I know it's ranked highly by most people, but I've always considered the A,B,X,Y setup to be a disaster.  There is nothing wrong with optimizing a controller for a single game, but don't make it the console's primary controller. I have to give it a 6 because it's better than average, but I can't say much more than that.   

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Quick question/suggestion.

Since there are only so many consoles out there, and for the most part the discussions for each console have been going on for longer than a week, should these debates maybe happen ever other week, instead of every week?  Just a thought.  It's not a problem for me if they continue weekly.  

@fox

Edited by TDIRunner
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I want to give it a high rating, maybe a bit unfair in some peoples eyes but it really was the best unique system of its generation.  The Gamecube, the purple lunchbox, the cube that could do little wrong, and it really did on its own little wrong.  Stifled from perfection due to a mostly fantastic controller lacking one more top button, and the mini DVD format which kept some from popping games on it annoyingly.  But those two things that triggered some obtuse developers helped other get very creative, and left the door open to some truly fantastic releases both in house, farmed out (2nd party), and from third parties too.

Early on the system was pretty magnificent, odd to the look, but excellent to the touch, the sight, the ears.  For me, it teleports me back to a favorite time for me, a huge year where it was one of the few I attended E3.  For those who were there, it was clear, and those who wish they were with the big updates and light streaming even then, they kind of realized it too albeit less clearly.  I had a feeling of what to kind of expect going in, stories, pictures, but stepping into the Nintendo booth was like a mix of the disneyland of video games, and an oprah like under the seat door prize rolled into one.  The door prize, Charles Martinet talking for hours (even cracking naughty jokes) on end to people who lined up to get one of ten spots, loaded with all sorts of fun foam cubes, gba's (in purple and white), some of those stuffed into licensed carriers too and one was the coveted months early US GBA with Mario or F-Zero inside!  I tried, got a couple foam goodies and a case.

But the big draw int the booth was almost equally so, the big flat screens they spread out with Luigi's Mansion, Wave Race, and the even larger crowd losing their minds over Rogue Squadron.  To see those games projected through their digital cable that went on to be a $300 nightmare these days was amazing to behold.  Finally a console that could render Star Wars models from the re-released movies from a year or few before and being able to fly in that.  Luigi looking real on the TV like a top of the line CGI cartoon, but you played it, the water in wave race looking like something from TV.  The controls, the audio, the experience was on another level even from the top of what PS2 had offered before or at the show, and blew the xbox out of the water with Halo...and..err..?  Yeah.

The system would go on to get so much amazing third party support through 3 of its 5 years, amazing releases that often ended up, multiplayer online lacking aside, being tops as far as quality went, aside from the compressed FMV and/or speech in some titles if they locked to 1 disc instead of 2.  Shamefully so many great games came out, they had sequels, and often NOT on the Cube, the storage lacking, the button missing, things just got left out.  Others were just trolls and ignored it entirely such as the tools at rockstar.  Gamecube, you can look back on it now, it may have been a near tie for second with MS's Pentium3 console, but it had the games in spade, and only since successive generations more are catching on they were jerks shunning it with the dozens of stunning titles, many unique to the system.  Sadly if anything qualifies it's greatness now, the terrible prices on the even more common of releases to the absurd on the lesser run stuff (like $300+ for Cubivore.)  Also a great harbinger of some lost Dreamcast goodies when Sega folded, Sega and Nintendo, who knew?!  Sonic, Crazy Taxi, SKies of Arcadia Legends?!

An amazing system, and you could leave it at that but then we'd be neglecting two big elephants in the room.  The Gameboy Player giving you 99.9% of a library into the thousands spread over two decades!  And then the ease of non-hardware damaging region unlocking for even more greatness with a simple cheap sold in stores boot disc (FreeLoader from Datel.)  it opened even more amazing doors to games we didn't get that hit both Japan (Hudson Selects, Shikigami no Shiro 2, Nintendo Puzzle Collection, Mr Driller, etc) and Europe (the ignorantly non localized yet IN ENGLISH...Doshin the Giant, among a few others.)  The cube had little fault, other than what the hateful media, hot console war trolls, and people getting a manufactured by MS hard on for paid multiplayer.  Yet those faults had bite, and the way the system trickled out in the last couple years made that more than ever evident.

9/10

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On 11/29/2020 at 4:34 AM, Estil said:

Dude just the Game Boy Player by itself is worth at least a 7/10.  I only wish there was a good way to play DS games on the TV...

I'm only rating a console on it's own library.  Just like I give the PS2 zero points for the PS1 library, I'm not giving anything to the gamecube for the gb player.  If the game wasn't native for the system, I'm not counting it.   Gamecube is Nintendo's 3rd worst console, after the Wii and the N64, which I rate a 1 and 2.

 

i

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16 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

Quick question/suggestion.

Since there are only so many consoles out there, and for the most part the discussions for each console have been going on for longer than a week, should these debates maybe happen ever other week, instead of every week?  Just a thought.  It's not a problem for me if they continue weekly.  

@fox

I would second this motion

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10 hours ago, peg said:

I'm only rating a console on it's own library.  Just like I give the PS2 zero points for the PS1 library, I'm not giving anything to the gamecube for the gb player.  If the game wasn't native for the system, I'm not counting it.   Gamecube is Nintendo's 3rd worst console, after the Wii and the N64, which I rate a 1 and 2.

That's different; you can do PS1 games on a PS1 or PS2 (or PS3 for that matter but not quite as good accuracy; for example Final Fantasy 2 from FF Origins the last 2/3 of the game are completely unplayable on a PS3).  The GC/Game Boy Player is the ONLY way you can play GBC/GBA games on the TV.  And even after 15 years there's STILL no good way to play DS games on the TV 😞 

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