The Gamecube was an era with a lot of interesting experiments: Pokemon Col and XD for example. Though I have a feeling that some arguments about lack of experiments since are probably tied to the Gamecube's performance.

I love Mii-verse, but I completely understand why they took it down. 

That shit got way too toxic.

Yes, exactly. There are examples on both sides, so OP is kinda moot.

The irony is that despite Gamecube's shortcomings, it is the console who has the fanbase who is continually the most insistent that Gamecube had the greatest lineup, the greatest controller, and was the greatest gaming console of all time. Maybe it's because my hands are too big (Gamecube's controller looks almost comically small in my hands) but that controller cramps my hands. And I felt like unless a player could get into Metroid Prime (which I didn't) that there wasn't anything else to write home about.

Mario Sunshine, Smash Melee, and Wind Waker have already been adequately criticized. So I'm going to focus on a few others.

I also feel Mario Kart Cube to be somewhat rushed, and it ended up being the second weakest of the Mario Kart franchise - with only Super Circuit really being worse: what reeked of rushing? Very poor balance of Karters/weapons when this game more than any other required extensive balancing (there's a good reason Nintendo never did exclusive weapons again), the tracks were the least memorable and most annoying (one of them was something like 10 laps around a circle), many of the others were more or less wide open fields with very little personality - and when you see a remix track that isn't up to par in later Mario Karts... yep, it's from the Gamecube version. Not to mention the gimmick of two karters on one kart just had people scratching their heads as to how this was any better than the first two Mario Kart's; it wasn't really thought through. Lastly, the audio was obviously really rushed, one of the few games that gave me a headache (and I don't remember if it was the really bad music or bad sound effects... maybe I don't want to remember).

Eternal Darkness - on paper, Historical setting, check, I LOVE historical settings; Survival and Horror, check, one of my favourite genres; sanity, that sounds amazing! In practice, on the surface the game was REALLY awkward to control, and unlike RE games that had some limited controls, it didn't add to the claustrophobia of the game, but rather made it annoying. The historical setting felt very tacked on, and each era had the depth of a 7 minute segment of a children's cartoon. The survival and horror elements were really weak, it was about as scary as Ocarina of Time's Shadow Temple, and nowhere near the levels of Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Lastly, the sanity meter didn't do shit except annoy you by wasting your time, there wasn't any other consequences. There was one really cool scene where you enter the bathroom, but that was about it, and the rest of the game reeked of good ideas and poor planning & implementation - a common theme in Silicon Knights games; this is also one of Gamecube's most overrated games because people judge it by the quality of the ideas on paper, and not by how terrible they were translated into the game. The only thing that horrified me in this survival and horror game were the crazy difficulty spikes. I was really taken in by these Silicon Knights pricks, I even bought that dreadfully unplayable Metal Gear Solid remake.

Metroid Prime (I didn't want to touch this because I had issues, but they weren't so much because the game felt rushed, but I wrote something that turned into a rant and it seems a shame to throw it away now! =P) - this was one of the most frustrating because all around I kept hearing how amazing this game was; but I couldn't get into it - it felt dry to me. The main reason I found myself dozy after minutes of play probably had to do with how lonely the game felt; there's lonely in a good "Silent Hill" type way, but this wasn't it; I think the first person angle made the game feel devoid of even having a main character present - older Metroid games, even Metroid 2 on Gameboy, didn't have this feeling. I also had issues with the controls, I never got used to them (and I almost finished Metroid Prime, but got stuck on the final or one of the final bosses and couldn't be bothered to "git gud"); on controls, the aiming was tank like, the platforming also felt off and I found myself more surprised with how often it actually worked, and confused when similar actions sent me tumbling down. The visor mechanic was another issue, good on paper but really clunky when implemented: it was obtrusive switching back and forth for little things, and the issue was compounded by the fact that most of the scan points were redundant or pointless; the worst part about it is if you got sick of scanning redundant crap, you could miss a vital section of the game, and could be lost wandering around for HOURS until you picked up Gamefaqs and found out what you had to do; I can't tolerate games whose difficulty is based on the needle in a haystack to proceed approach (Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, I AM LOOKING AT YOU).

Not to mention the Gamecube controller. There were a lot of interesting rumours that Nintendo was exploring a new sort of controller; one that it could split apart so you could hold half in one hand and half in the other. Sega also commented on these during the Dreamcast lifecycle. None of this really materialized as we got that comically small poorly thought out dual shock-clone controller instead. It wasn't until the Wii and Switch that we got the controllers that resembled what was rumoured. There are those who will worship the Gamecube controller with the same faith that Ceres would bring rain to your crops if you sacrificed 3 baby goats on an altar; but I have some serious issues with it. The small crampy size alone (it might be that my hands are too large, I am a tall person) was bad enough, but there was more: Nintendo seemed to neglect the fact that many third party games were built around the diamond facebutton concept that (ironically, they devised with the SNES controller) all other consoles used, so something always felt off about every third party game on the Gamecube in that regards - fighting games that used complex button combos had to be redesigned or cancelled due to the controls - just ask CAPCOM, who had a close relationship with Nintendo, but couldn't bring their fighters over; later when using the controller for Wii Virtual console games, many of them were rendered unplayable due to the big green button preventing a number of combos. On top of that, 2D games suffered heavily because the dpad was so small it was unusuable, mainly there for decoration purposes. Also (and again, it might be my freakishly large hands), the Z-trigger seemed out of place and overly small - and speaking of triggers, the L&R had annoying springs in them all to support the hose strength of Mario Sunshine... and nothing else. A lot of the stuff with the Gamecube controller was short sited.


I do recall an interview where Nintendo said they were shortening dev cycles for the Gamecube in an attempt to make more games... The N64 suffered from droughts with as few as just 1 or 2 games TOTAL getting released in a month; and good meaningful releases were few and far between. In the end, the drop in quality from the N64 titles made the Gamecube droughts feel even worse with whole years passing with nothing worth playing.

In the end, we got the Wii, and I was thankful for that. It was like an oasis at the end of a very long desert with all the hype, quality of games, and optimism in the Nintendo fanbase, and salt in the wounds of the Sony fanbase to the point where many gigantic Sony fans who bashed Nintendo for years were acting like advocates for Nintendo's pre-Wii days, HAHA. Year 1 for the Wii was really special, as that was also the year the DS picked up; I had more fun in videogaming through 2007 than all the years combined from the release of Ogre Battle 64 (I had to fucking import that one twice, cost me more than the goddamn N64 =D) and Majora's Mask in 2000... so a dark age of 6 years followed by a renaissance which brought in the Virtual Console and the promise (which was for the most part delivered on) of all the games that I wanted to play before and missed - a new generation of party games taking it to a whole new level, a slew of really creative and very Nintendo-like quirky games that defied genre, as well as the first really major S-Tier Nintendo game since Ocarina of Time... all that in just one year.

Like it or hate it (for whatever weird biased reasons) the Wii was a triumph for Nintendo, and to this day no home console has sold more in one year than Wii did in 2008; and the only other gaming console to surpass it in sales was DS, at around the same time. It remains to date the biggest party machine the videogame industry ever yielded at the same time as having many of the most innovative and original games, and having a few of the highest quality games ever released.  If SNES was the golden age, Wii/DS was the diamond age.


As for the Wii U, I wonder if that era had to happen so Nintendo could practice HD development before the release of the Switch? That's a long shot...
Anyway, Wii U had Xenoblade Chronicles X, and despite its flaws, remains one of my favourite games of all time. Gamecube had Skies of Arcadia Legends, an "enhanced" port of my favourite games of all time - I put "enhanced" in quotes because they also dropped the audio quality for Gamecube (for some reason during the N64 and Gamecube era Nintendo had big issues with audio).

Even if some of their titles were rushed, I love that lunch box, still has most of my fondest gaming memories.

Be it Air Ride, Luigi's Mansion, the Merios, the Zeldas, the Stair Fax, WarioWare and World, the best Fire Emblem, etc.

Heck I can't imagine how much would I love titles like Wind Waker even more if it had those 2 dungeons.

The Gamecube was the first console I ever got and bought games for, so it has a lot of nostalgic value for me. As far as I'm concerned, the Gamecube controller is still the best traditional dual analog controLler ever designed, It's comfortable and I think the button layout makes much more sense than with other controllers. Loved games like Melee.

I'm not saying that no games have ever been rushed before or since, but not the big ones. A Mario Tennis being rushed is a different beast entirely from a mainline 3D Mario or Zelda being rushed. It's impossible to imagine the sequels to Breath of the Wild or Mario Odessey being rushed, because Nintendo doesn't do that with those franchises anymore. They'll be delayed until the developer is sure that they're ready or won't be announced for years after the beginning of their development.

The point that Nintendo felt it had to rush Mario and Zelda in particular because the Gamecube wasn't doing too well is interesting. Both ended up being relatively early Gamecube games, with Mario releasing in 2002 and Wind Waker in 2002 in Japan and 2003 in the US. Later in the system's life cycle they didn't seem to rush big games like that. Of course, there was no other mainline Mario game, Twilight Princess was delayed for the Wii's launch, and many of their franchises were outsourced out of Japan, including both Gamecube Star Fox games and both Metroid games. And Sega made F-Zero. With all the talk of missing franchises recently, Nintendo themselves hadn't made a console Star Fox game at all between Star Fox 64 and Zero, they haven't made a console F-Zero game since the N64, and they haven't made a console Metroid without outsourcing it since Super Metroid. Weird.

It's a shame Wind Waker and Sunshine didn't have another 6 months to work with, but at least Nintendo has given enough time to every mainline game that followed them.

Not sure if true, but even if it's I don't think it matters much today

Double Dash is probably my favorite Mario Kart game =p

Ahhh, so this is why 1/3 of your posts are about how overrated Retro is and how much you hate them!

I love GameCube. Regardless if games were rushed or not, I had a blast playing all of them back then in my late teens- early twenties. Luigi’s mansion is one of my favorite GameCube games.