Aricle: Xbox vs Gamecube. Looking back at the battle for 2nd place.

[DarkNight_DS]

You guys are smoking crack! When the cube was released it was freaking cutting edge design. Learn your history folks! The Cube was also based on a Mac product that was high in demand. It even has many of the same components of the Mac product it was based on. The design was brilliant, Nintendo was able to nail it spot on where Apple had many issues with their version of the Cube. Apple had to do a bunch of recalls due to plastic cracks and decided that their cube would see the axe in favor of the tower (that they earlier ridiculed for being too PC'ish)

Now, another thing which was pure genius of Nintendo was their disc design. That disc ensured that it would be pretty hard to copy any Gamecube game. It was the best anti piracy measure of the 3 console makers. The things most of you guys are accusing Nintendo of being out in left field on were some of the best things that the Cube brought to gaming. The system is very reliable, easily the most reliable of last gen. It was quiet, had a top loading disc drive, was cheap to manufacture and looked very futuristic at the time.

You can criticize the cube all you want, Nintendo put a LOT of thought into that lunchbox and it shows. Nintendo's biggest problem was their history. They made huge mistakes during the N64 era and the entire company walked on egg shells. They invented modern 3d gaming and somehow lost their way as a developer. They weren't able to spit out as many games as they did on the SNES and NES and they didn't understand what people wanted out of 3d games. They sat around thinking too much and they didn't spend enough time actually doing something. There have been countless interviews where people inside Nintendo have admitted they didn't know what to do when it came to make a 3d game. They were so use to making 2d games, their competition knew this and walked all over them.

Here's a secret Nintendo still has a lot of developers who are scared of making 3d games. These guys were moved from being console developers to handheld developers at the end of the N64 era and we've seen a LOT of their awesome games show up on the GBA and DS. The guy who understands how to think in 3d the best is handling most of the Wii development now. Shigeru is their 3d teacher, he's been working with mostly YOUNG teams to train them with his vision. The old school Nintendo people handle our 2d/2.5d DS games.

Nintendo was LOST, like seriously LOST in the 3d world of games. This is why Sony went full force with their 3d or die mantra. They knew Nintendo couldn't adapt as fast when all it's dev's were out of touch with the new design tools. The N64 was too hard to program for by Nintendo's own people. It was a horrible design and no one was prepared at Nintendo to handle it other then Shigeru and his team.

So drop the idea that the cube was ugly. The ugliest thing about the Cube was the dirty secret that Nintendo hid from everyone. It took them 2 generations to get a handle on the programming end. This is one more reason why the Wii is basically a cube, Nintendo might be telling everyone that they were trying to keep dev costs down for third parties. Truth is, their teams learned how to do some great stuff on the cube and instead of being left behind again with a new way of doing game design on a new architecture they decided it would be easier for them to not retrain everyone and pump out games.

There are a few interviews which have talked about this topic but no one's really discussed it fully. You can easily see this though, I mean come on look at their game output and tell me I'm wrong.

Here's a pic in case you forget what it looked like:

Anyone notice something funny about this picture?? Oh ya... it's a freaking Gamecube AKA Apple G4 Cube

Here's an even better view of the Apple G4 Cube.  Notice any design similarities???