Despite its flaws, in terms of hardware and software, a reader explains why the Nintendo GameCube is his mostly fondly remembered video game console.
My love of Nintendo GameCube is weird. I’m not going to deny that the Nintendo GameCube is my favourite games console ever. But it was the first console that I felt was truly my own, because my brothers didn’t play it. It was bought for my 10th birthday in 2002 and it was situated in my bedroom – so I could play it whenever I wanted to. Yet beyond this, I loved the GameCube for its start-up screen signature, getting sports games and pitting the AI against each other in tournaments, and playing the exclusive WWE games on it.
Something I particularly loved about the GameCube was you had all these family friendly platformers and sports titles with Nintendo’s iconic mascots adorning them, but occasionally a Resident Evil game would turn up exclusively on the system and soak all that bountiful joy in viscous dread. There was a variety on the GameCube I really love and appreciate, and there were many experimental first and third party games on the system too.
Yet no matter how much I love Nintendo GameCube, I know it was a huge step down from the N64. The Pokémon games we loved on the N64, such as Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Stadium 2, and Pokémon Snap were replaced with the likes of Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale Of Darkness. Not to say the latter two games were terrible, but the pleasures and joys of the N64 games were lost and replaced with something far less enticing and inviting.
I reckon both of these Pokémon GameCube adventures mirrored the declining popularity of Pokémon. Personally, I loved Pokémon a lot in my single digits, but from 2002 onwards my interest disappeared, and thus these GameCube games represent my diminished Pokémon fandom.
WWF/WWE games were also very stripped back on GameCube. The Herculean success of the Attitude era and its exclusive N64 titles WWF WrestleMania 2000 and WWF No Mercy were replaced with four WWE games that wouldn’t even defeat Kurt Angle if he was blindfolded and both of his legs were taped together.
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WrestleMania X8 was poor and didn’t start things well at all. WrestleMania XIX was appreciable for its audacious Revenge Mode but only felt like a marginal improvement over X8. Then the Day Of Reckoning games were really solid and enjoyable, but you still couldn’t defend titles in Exhibition mode, nor could you play as any WWE superstar in their story modes. The WWE games had been scaled back significantly and they just weren’t on the level that came before, despite a few of them still being readily enjoyable.
This weird love of GameCube I’ve been talking about is nestled in the consensus that this console was far inferior to the N64, and many of the games didn’t hit anywhere near as hard as they did on N64. I still favour the GameCube among every system because of its quirks. From the lunchbox-like design to the start-up screen, and how it can play different jingles if you hold down the ‘Z’ button, to the experimentation of the games that released on the system.
The Nintendo GameCube is still my favourite console no matter how middling it might seem when considering all the games consoles ever released.
By reader James Davie
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