No shit. I mean what console has survived as long as those OG Gamecubes. I have had mine for 20 years and the first issue came up this year. Turns out it’s an easy fix I can do myself and nothing destroying the console itself I can still play while working on this fix.
Also the Gamecube had so many games that were moved from the N64 that and some of the rarest games exist on Gamecube. Sometimes I can’t believe it was ever a flop for them because it was a childhood favorite. I’m so glad I kept mine and tried to take good care of it even when it was in storage for so long.
I don’t think any console today or even back at the time in 99 or early 2000s would last 20 years with kids turning into adults and 5-6 moves without having a console breaking issue.
Ive had 2 PS2’s go down, a PS3 Gen1 break, 3 Xbox 360, and very sadly an OG Xbox that did last from 2005 to 2015, an N64, and my PS4 Slim is getting there for sure. All (except the 64) gotten years (some a decade) after this Gamecube I still have today.
Thank my lucky stars my sister gave it back to me because it is my rock of a console. It should have done so much better than what articles and money say. It’s a very sought after retro console and I’m glad I still have and take care of mine from 2003 when I was a youngin’
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GameCube was good, but I say the SEGA Dreamcast definitely takes the Underrated and Underutilized Console award.
Wii U: Am I a joke to you?
Everyone: YES
To me, the WiiU is the modern Dreamcast. I miss it and it’s promises that we’re never kept :(
The only thing wrong with the wiiu was the price of the games. People call it the “switch tax” but I had to pay $90 for pikmin 3 in 2013, when the idea of $70 games was still rocking the world of Sony and MS fans. If it wasn’t for a gift I never would have accepted that price.
WiiU was underpowered when it launched. Even if someone had utilized it 100%, it still would have been behind compared to the Xbox360 and PS3. 720p only when the Xbox and PS2 were already supporting 720p and 1080i was also a bad choice.
WiiU was just a bunch of bad choices combined in a single product. Bad hardware choices, bad marketing, bad name, requiring the massive gamepad for console setup, etc.
nintendo is kind of known for bad performance, but the wiiu really took the cake for outdated and low performance at launch.
also the gamepads are region locked (why, nintendo?)
They weren’t though, they were keeping up all the way to the Wii when it became a different lane so it didn’t matter as much but their catalogue and capabilities have struggled since then.
I’m actually headed for anti Nintendo because I’m so sick of them at this stage. Everything is gimmicky and expensive.
I dunno who told you the Wii U was 720p-only. Mine ran at 1080p all day, every day - albeit some games used upscaling to reduce the graphical workload.
Kind of missing the point of Nintendo. They make epic games. The Wii-U was a massive miss step for Nintendo from a marketing perspective and even the control pad had some massive flaws around it too but damn I love this console for what it was and the games.
It was a stepping stone to get to the Switch though. It was super under powered compared to the PS4 and Xbox when released and even more so with the PS5 and Xbox Fridge or Toaster or whatever the One is called these days. Based on specs but it played great and looks damn good on my 4k UHD tv and the OLED console display really pops for its size. But all and all it’s shit on paper based on specs and that’s fine as Nintendo knows how to work with what they got and it’s a mighty fine console.
Also Blast Processing!!! Bro
Nintendo used to make powerful hardware that was actually competitive too. I wish they’d go back to that. So many third parties dropped most Nintendo support because they keep making decisions that severely limit third party developers. N64 lacked CDs, Gamecube had tiny CDs, Wii was literally just the Gamecube in a different shell and therefore underpowered, WiiU was underpowered, Switch is underpowered.
Nintendo literally changed their entire business strategy because they want to repeat the sales of the Wii.
Imagine how much better TotK could have been if it had an actually powerful console. Korok Forest would get more than 15 fps.
tbf 720p and 1080i are pretty similar
Not really. They’re nearly as similar as 1080p and 720p, really. 1080i is a vertical resolution 1.5 times bigger than 720p, just like 1080p.
The only difference actually is that 720p is a progressive scan inage, not an interlaced image. This means the field is constructed top down row by row. Once the field is constructed, it is displayed as a single field.
An interlaced image constructs two fields separately in short succession, with one field having only odd rows and the other having only even rows. They’re displayed on screen fast enough so that the image appears complete, but an interlaced image can have a noticeable “jitter” effect because every other vertical row on screen is updated slightly later than the others. Depending on the display, it can also have decreased brightness or a flashing like effect because the time inbetween both fields being displayed can be visible to the human eye.
Had an internet browser.
Controllers had mini screens available.
Shit was OP, ahead of its time.
Man issue with most things is $$$.
No point in releasing the most advanced console if people can’t afford it or its features, ensuring no developers actually make games for it.
The GameCube was a flop mostly because of image and marketing, not because it wasn’t technically good.
I have one and I love it, but I only got it long, long after release.
What 12-year-old boy asking for a Christmas present is going to choose the cutesy purple brick that “only has kid games” over a sleek black PS2 that is seen as being adult, with action and fighting games? Not many, and so the GameCube flopped.
I think Nintendo were starting to see at that time that consoles weren’t just for boys. They were for girls too, and for the whole family, and the GameCube was a step towards that. But it didn’t go far enough. They ended up stopping short and falling smack in the middle where it didn’t appeal to the established ‘male gamer’ demographic, and still didn’t grab families either.
Then the Wii came along and went HARD on the family-friendly aspect, and just blasted off the shelves. Nintendo learned a lesson, but the GameCube was the price they had to pay for it.
You touched on a few good points, but I think ultimately reached the wrong conclusion.
What 12-year-old boy asking for a Christmas present is going to choose the cutesy purple brick that “only has kid games” over a sleek black PS2 that is seen as being adult, with action and fighting games?
This was literally Segas entire marketing strategy. Nintendo early on decided to lean heavily into the family friendly marketing for their consoles starting with the NES (or famicom, literally family computer) for various reasons but most prominently because of the videogame crash of the 70s.
Sega saw an opportunity to position themselves as an edgier option that would appeal more to the tween and teen demographic and so leaned very heavily into that in their advertising in the 80s and particularly the 90s. This tactic was rather successful and so Nintendo developed a reputation as the console for children. This image was further cemented by certain decisions by Nintendo around game content, most prominently by the rather shortsighted decision to force the Mortal Kombat series of games to recolor characters blood to green instead of the red it was on arcade and sega systems (this could be disabled using a hidden cheat code somewhat rendering the entire exercise moot).
When Sony and Microsoft came along they didn’t really need to do anything special besides release whatever games they wanted, the damage to Nintendo’s rep was already done. Nintendo then made things even worse for themselves by releasing a console in bright candy colors most closely associated with marketing towards young children that literally looked like a small childs lunchbox.
Then the Wii came along and went HARD on the family-friendly aspect, and just blasted off the shelves.
Nintendo realized that they wouldn’t be able to shake the children’s console rep they had developed easily and so decided to lean heavily into messaging that their consoles were also for adults. Much of the marketing for the Wii (in fact the majority of it) depicted the console being played by adults and the elderly. It was actually somewhat rare to see advertising for the Wii showing young children using the console, a stark contrast from Nintendo’s previous marketing.
This was also reflected in the design aesthetic of the console and its packaging featuring a modern minimalist flat white color scheme with minimal light blue highlights. Compared with previous Nintendo consoles the Wii was downright drab looking. Its packaging looked more like a product from Ikea than a games console.
Nintendo further lucked out with the Wii in that it had a novel control system utterly unlike anything else in the market at the time and so had a massive novelty factor going for it. Additionally helping with this was that they positioned the console at the extreme low end of the market releasing it at a price point well below half the cost of their nearest competitor.
I thought the Dreamcast earned this title
For sure. Lots of people knew how awesome game cube was and what it was capable of. Its lacking graphics with extremely well made games. The dreamcast was a powerhouse with VGA out. Barely anyone knew how amazing it was. It could have blown away Sony. Sega really dropped the ball. I wish I had known when it came out.
I thought it was more powerful than ps2
Both the Dreamcast and GameCube are.
The sad thing is I knew at the time, but lack of games and, most of all, the lack of my friends having it, made the dreamcast lose in favour of its contenders.
I’m on my 3rd dreamcast but it’s been fine for the last couple decades. My genesis, though, 1991 and still fine. Kicking myself actually, the cartridge port was feisty for EVER but i finally had the guts to really look in there and i tweezed out 30 years of fuzz that had felted down in it.
The dreamcast is still underrated it seems.
Looks at OG Atari 2600 still chugging away on my gaming shelf after almost 40 years and chuckles.
I miss my gamecube. That and the ps2 have to be the pinnacle of home console. After those two consoles PCs have reigned supreme.
It’s a good thing we can emulate them easily with Dolphin and PCSX2.
GameCube was the Nokia of the gaming consoles. Actually, it probably still is.
My roommate and I stood in line for it, I remember marveling over how well-made it was. They got everything right. Even the little beeps and boops using the OS itself. You don’t really see that anymore.
Now it’s ads and garbage all over the screen. Even at that I think ps3 xmb was my favorite console os
I just grabbed a Wii U and modded it so I can play mostly Gamecube, but also some Wii and Wii U games. So much fun completing Timesplitters, and the occasional Mario Football
I like my hacked Wii u. Pretty versatile
The GameCube had one key flaw and that is that nobody actually used it to it’s fullest potential.
Look at something like the Resident Evil Remake:
Just a great looking game, head and shoulders above what was happening on the PS2.
But most GameCube games, even the good ones, looked like garbage.
The key flaw was it using mini disks. Not only did this kneecap storage capacity for developers, but it also made it difficult to pirate games, which is ironically a big part of its failure.
Check out the raspberry pi mods you can do now!
The games that used the game boy as a controller and second screen were interesting.
Anyone remember when GameStop was selling refurbished GameCubes for $30? I think I bought 2.
I got one for $5 at a garage sale. It didn’t have controllers, the AC cord, or the video wires. It did however have a copy of smash in the disc drive which I consider a win, but I still haven’t tested it out lol. I bought the AC cord (cost twice as much as the console lol). There’s not really official cables that work for modern TVs. There’s some janky Chinese ones on Amazon that need power to operate, and the fire danger of some random off brand AV cord sketches me out. I’ve also been too lazy to look for controllers. One day though, there will be smash.
I still have mine and it works fine too! Great console. I still have an OG Xbox too.
Like others said, ut was competing with ps2 which had a dvd player. Also, I didn’t actually care for the gamecube games available at release, whereas ps2 had some great options, AND it was backwards compatible with ps1. So right off the bat ps2 had a great bunch of games available, many of which you could get really cheap and used. For kids at the time who were on a budget and buying games with their allowance, ps2 was a far better value at the time. If I had enough money to get but, I absolutely would have.
