I thought GameCube actually had OK 3rd party support. Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 0, Viewtiful Joe, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II/III, Phantasy Quest Online (for whatever reason) and multiplat titles like Soul Calibur 2, Beyond Good & Evil, The Matrix, SSX Tricky, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, TimeSplitters 2, Splinter Cell, Madden NFL, NBA Street, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, etc. in itself isn't exactly terrible.
There were plenty of fun games to play.
The system just wasn't "cool" enough though, the loss of James Bond is really understated as GoldenEye 007 was really important to the N64 in the West where it managed to sell about the same as the Super NES (the main loss came from Japan). And then there was the loss of "realistic Zelda", well they did get Twilight Princess but the system was effectively dead by that point so it made no difference.
Metroid Prime was too slow paced of an IP to carry a system.
Things like Animal Crossing and Pikmin weren't ready to be embraced as big hit franchises at that time, again the pop culture of the day was hyper obsessed with being "cool".
The N64 was really the first "shooter box" console with things like GoldenEye 007, Turok, DOOM 64, Perfect Dark, etc. This was long before Call of Duty. It definitely had an edge over the Playstation there, but they basically gave that away to the XBox. In a parrallel reality circa 1999 I probably tell Nintendo to go quietly buy out the studio called Bungie just up the street from NOA and make the game they're working on (Halo) exclusive to the Dolphin/GameCube.
