burninmylight on 07 October 2020
How much time ya got? Let's see...
- The PS2 had a one-year headstart. It didn't come flying out of the gate, but that's an entire year to establish a foothold and marketshare unchallenged.
- That DVD drive really was a gamechanger. Going from VHS to DVD was a tremendous jump in graphical fidelity and playback quality for most people, and the PS2 was one of the cheapest and easiest to acquire DVD players on the market. It really helped justify the PS2's place in living rooms until the deluge of games came, while the GCN had no such fallback.
- How do you market a purple lunch pail next to big,black, badass behemoths like the PS2 and Xbox? Imagine telling your friends you bought the Fischer-Price toy over the PS2 that everyone else has.
- Yes, the mini-discs were a factor. Not in actual performance; like you said, most games from that gen could fit within the confines of the 1.5GB space, especially with GCN's compression technology (and if they couldn't, making multi-disc games weren't a big deal; those discs were super cheap). But like the above, they came across as very kiddy, and no one between the ages of 10 and 25 got time for dat. For the real space issues, see the point below on memory cards.
- The controller, again, looked like a toy meant for young kids. With all of it's bright colors and bean-shaped buttons, it looked like something you'd find on some cheap console in the Toys section at Wal-Mart that with a few built-in games that are either mind-numbingly simple, educational but boring, or some Chinese knockoff. The Dual Shock 2 was an evolution of an already-loved controller, and The Duke was the gaming equivalent of a large Chevy or BMW; compensating for something, but a bastion of raw manliness nonetheless.
- Nintendo's first party memory cards were a freaking joke. Most people think that Nintendo's cheapness with storage started with Wii, but go look up how much memory came on GCN memory cards compared to PS2 memory cards (not to ignore the fact that Xbox had a built-in hard drive). Many games, namely sports titles like the Maddens, had save files that were too large for a single first party card, so devs had to find ways to cut corners or features. I personally had a MadCatz card that held 16x the space of the largest first party card; it was popular, but notorious for corruption and losing previous saves, but thankfully mine never ran into any problems for almost a decade.
- The GCN first party output is easily one of the weirdest and least celebrated (at the time) generations in Nintendo's history, rivaled only by the Wii U. Wind Waker (more on that later), Mario Sunshine, both Star Foxes, DK Jungle Beat were all considered offbeat departures from what fans were expecting after their N64 entries. Waverace: BS, NBA Courtside, Pikmin, Animal Crossing were all too niche to really capture an audience on a system that struggled out of the gate.
I already know that I will get a few replies on this one about how beloved and celebrated some of the games I mentioned are now, but the keyword is NOW. Were you there for Spaceworld 2001, for the reveal of Cel-da? On April Fool's Day, no less? Isn't Sunshine generally considered the worst 3D Mario game in the series? And boy, don't get me started on Star Fox... point is, people didn't think Nintendo was bringing their A-game at the time. Even Mario Kart: Double Dash's new and unique was often panned as gimmicky and adding little to the gameplay. We fondly look back on many of these games now, but they didn't light the world ablaze when they launched almost two decades ago. - Grand Theft Auto 3. There aren't enough words to express how much of a gamechanger this title was. GTA3 is THE hood ornament of that generation. It was the cultural zeitgeist of the early 2000s. Being the one console without it was the equivalent of being the one guy in the locker room who was still a virgin.
