Metroid Prime, though.

But really, the big difference is just the hardware. N64 games were good, but they run like shit and playing them on that atrocious controller made the whole experience a nightmare. They've also aged far worse than GameCube games in general.

You're absolutely entitled to your taste, but I didn't mean to say the GC games are better. They've aged better, and that's a little different.

Ocarina of Time was an unprecedented revolutionary masterpiece in its time. Nowadays, it's still an amazing game, but that's about it. Wind Waker was a great game in its time, and it still is just about as good as back then.

Star Fox 64 was a great game in its time, and it's not gotten much worse since then, it's aged pretty well for N64 standards. Adventures and Assault haven't aged at all, though: they were mediocre in their time, and are mediocre now.

Mario 64 to Sunshine is the same situation as Ocarina of Time to Wind Waker, though I don't know if I'd call Sunshine a great game.

Basically I meant to say that GameCube games can be judged by today's standards very similarly to how you'd judge them 15 years ago, unlike N64 games which are a lot worse than they originally were if you don't put yourself in that 90's mindset. Regardless of how great the likes of Ocarina of Time were, it is jarring going back nowadays and playing games at 20fps and having to endure that mind-numbingly slow text scroll speed, along with a few more things that have aged awkwardly. Wind Waker might not be as great, but there isn't much about it that makes you go "wow, this game is old".

That's exactly how I felt about the software. The first party software felt like Nintendo had lost a step coming off the N64 which, despite having the monumental blunder of going with cartridges, still managed to come off with some very magical software.

Sunshine, I can't ever get behind this game. It didn't feel like a Mario game at all, let alone a 3D Mario game. It completely lacked the diversity that made the others feel like some grand adventure (even the first Super Mario Bros). The variety characterized every other mainline Mario game in existence (is Sunshine even a mainline Mario game?), including most of the not-so-mainline ones (like 3D Land and World). There was something very flat about the game. I got the same feeling from 3D World, but at the same time, it had the diversity - so it felt like a nice throwback.

But for someone a little taller than most, larger hands, the controller always cramped right above my thumb most games. Plus the button configuration made certain fighting games impossible. Try playing Virtual Console games from SNES on Wii with the Gamecube controller, because many of them have three-button transitioning, they don't work very well. Super Mario World was virtually unplayable, but it was still a fine compared to the nightmare that was Street Fighter 2 on the Gamecube controller. It's not just the weird trigger buttons, or the bizarre face buttons that made action games more difficult, but also the fact that the d-pad was more or a less a functional decoration.

Animal Crossing, I'll give that one to Gamecube fans, that one was a lot of fun, and one of the few games that didn't cramp up my hand after 10 minutes, and it was a unique experience that was a lot of fun.

But Pikmin? That's one of those games that seems like I should have loved (I loved SimAnt), but found terribly uninteresting; I think the series has potential, but the GameCube game missed those brass rings. Eternal Darkness? Was as unremarkable as Survival and Horror games get - the historical setting was a nice idea but poorly executed as the game failed to capture the essence of any of its time periods, the action was sloppy, and the insanity system was gimmicky at best (there's an indie game called Don't Starve, that's how to do an insanity system), but its real failing was that it was one of the worst balanced games I've played, ever... it made TMNT on NES feel reasonable.

All in all, the Gamecube was kind of like the darker half of the dark age for Nintendo. But the console was a bit of a stopgap.

Metroid Prime was indeed fantastic, as was Prime 2, F-Zero GX, Resident Evil 4, and Twilight Princess. But those are about the only GCN games I'd call real gems, while that number is outweighed by the number of N64, Wii, SNES, even Wii U titles I'd award the same honour.

What about Star Fox Assault? What was your issue with that one? And you're missing a lot of gems there. Not an RPG fan, I take it? Or a Pikmin fan?

Ehh... Arwing missions are overrated in my opinion. They felt slow and too scripted - the Arwing's movements were simplified from SF64, the movement speed was also slowed down, and as a result the whole level design and gameplay was made slower and more basic to compensate. It felt more like you were just watching the game play itself than it did a high-octane on-rails arcade shooter like it was on the N64.

Still, they were by far the best the game had to offer. The on-foot and landmaster controls were awfully bad.

I actually agree, they were nowhere near as great as SF64, just way better the the horrible on-foot/tank stuff. Overall still a bad game, like Adventures.

To be fair... I personally consider StarFox 64/Lylat Wars to be the best entry in the series, not even StarFox Zero on the WiiU or the SNES games were as good in my opinion.
StarFox Zero might have been better if we weren't forced to use motion controls... Probably why it hasn't received a Switch port yet.