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 :(
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nintendo is kind of known for bad performance, but the wiiu really took the cake for outdated and low performance at launch.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.
Some of this is factually wrong, some of this I disagree with personally.
I’m not gonna stand here and claim the WiiU was a good business choice or the best possible design for what they were going for. That was the Switch, and… well, yeah, it’s the biggest console out there for a reason.
I’ll say for it that, like the GameCube, it’s less of an interesting retro ownership piece just because so much of its library ended up getting Switch ports. Given the scarcity, some of the reliability issues and the rarity of some games, though, you can be sure I’m sitting on my Wii U and physical games indefinitely. I’m not a speculative collector, but that Wii U copy of The Wonderful 101 is gonna be a good investment at some point.
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.
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.
Had an internet browser.
Controllers had mini screens available.
Shit was OP, ahead of its time.
It did cloud game streaming in 2012 and, unlike the Sony Portal, the Steam Link or Xbox Cloud, it actually worked.
Granted, while you were within spitting distance of the unit and had clear line of sight, but still. Impressively lagless wireless video out of a console in the early 2010s? We don’t respect that enough.
The Dreamcast did that in 2012? How?
I think he got it mixed up with the Wii U…
I think it’s safe to say that Sega wasn’t doing anything with Dreamcast in 2012, ten years after it was discontinued.
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.
I’m not a fan of the Dreamcast library at all. If you ask me, that’d be the Saturn, which has more interesting games by a wide margin, IMO. If anything, I feel the DC has been mythologized unfairly. It has good ports of a bunch of great ports of fighting games from the worst period for fighting games and a few 3D arcade ports from the worst period for 3D arcade games.
The Dreamcast library can feel underwhelming because of how shortlived the console was. Most Dreamcast games didn’t get to fully realize the console’s power because it didn’t last long enough for the potential to be fully realized. EA was afraid of piracy so didnt even try to develop for it, and the Dreamcast launched too close to the Saturn for most people. However, it was the fastest selling console in the US at the time. But then like, a year and a half later the PS2 launched and killed any chance the Dreamcast had.
Dreamcast had a lot of good games. Notably, Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, Shenmue, Grandia 2, and Record of Lodoss War. But what I think makes the library good is how experimental all the games on it were. Games like Illbleed. Its hard to find “duplicate” games on the Dreamcast, unless you look at like, the Resident Evil port and Dino Crisis port.
For a console that realistically only existed for about 18 months, it did quite well. Had the Dreamcast not launched so close to the Saturn, had SEGA supported the Saturn in the US more, had the PS2 not come along to kick it down, and had EA not dropped it instantly, then I definitely think the console would have done well.
It didn’t have a chance. Those are a lot of “ifs”. You’re basically saying if the other console manufacturers hadn’t manufactured consoles then the Dreamcast would have done great.
Look, from a design perspective, the DC was ahead of its time: cram a PC in a console shell, focus on sharp resolutions and online support. The template ended up becoming the Xbox and eventually after the 360 era it’s what all modern consoles are.
But in the context of them trying to bounce back from the Saturn’s very mishandled Western run, it was the absolute wrong console to make. All the arguments from Sega fans about how the games looked nicer than the PS2 and whatnot just didn’t hold up to scrutiny on the displays of the time. Was the resolution much higher? Yep. Did it matter when plugged in using component cables to a crummy consumer CRT? Absolutely not. It looked a whole generation behind.
And again, be careful about rating worldwide success from what happened in the US. The DC did surprisingly well there, like the N64 did, but much less elsewhere. The Gamecube outsold it 2:1, as did the original Xbox, and the PS2 ended up outselling both of those 10:1. The Dreamcast was in stores over here, for sure, but I have never met anybody who owned one.
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.
Okay, here’s my obligatory reminder that it’s less of a flop than people, particularly in anglo territories, give it credit for. It sold just shy of the original Xbox and it outsold well liked stuff like the Dreamcast or the Vita about 2 to 1.
A few consoles at that time were very regional. The N64 was a rare sight where I’m from, I have seen an original Xbox in the wild exactly once, it was being used as a DVD player and the owner had no games for it. The Gamecube picked up a lot of steam over here once the price went down to 100 bucks and it got a reputation for having some of the best excluisves of that generation later in its lifespan.
The one thing I’d argue about its longevity as a retro console is that it’s almost entirely superseded by the Wii, which can play the entire library natively, has more functional output options and is super easy to find. The Cube is cuter, more iconic and built like a brick, though, so it’s a better thing to have on a shelf.
Here’s MY obligatory reminder that GameCube had little compartments on the bottom that you could hide yer drugs in!
And a handle. From that perspective it was a nice tiny lunchbox with a cool console attached to 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.
They didn’t “luck out”, they were reproducing the strategy that had already worked in the DS. Remember “Brain Training”? To this day I know people who claim to loathe videogames who owned a DS and were cool with it. Same core design: accessible, unorthodox input system as a trojan horse for adults, here are all the games it turns out you also enjoy playing.
It’s the same with the Switch and the detachable controller, dockable console gimmick. If anything, the Wii U is the outlier in them not designing it well enough to pay off that ongoing strategy. One could argue that the 3DS did as well, but that glassless 3D screen is amazing, particularly once they figured out eye tracking, you’re all wrong about that one.
Remember “Brain Training”?
No actually, I’m not sure what that is. The only novel feature I was aware of with the DS was the dual screens. The clamshell form factor had already been proven out with the SP, and stylus based touch screens were relatively common at the time having been proven out with the PalmPilot and its various clones. Unfortunately for Nintendo the original DS was just a bit too big and bulky for a portable, something they fixed with the DS Lite and subsequently the DSi and 3DS.
That said, the bigger factor I think at the time was the price point. The Wii at launch retailed for $250 and very quickly fell to $200 and late in its life could even be found for as low as $100. In contrast the PlayStation 3 launched at a minimum of $500 to as much as $600 for the highest capacity model. The XBox 360 which had been on the market for about a year at that point was a little better off with its minimal configuration being available at a modest $300, with its most expensive offering coming in at $480.
Making things worse for Sony but better for Nintendo the PS3 had rampant supply shortages and scalping leading to it commanding even higher prices at launch. Around the holidays the XBox 360 had similar issues although far less extreme. In contrast Nintendo managed to maintain a steady supply of the Wii and while there would occasionally be shortages leading to bare shelves they never lasted long which helped cut down on instances of scalping.
The pricing in conjunction with the novelty of the Wii controls is what led it to such a huge success. The funky motion controls were an interesting gimmick and were enough in many people’s minds to justify spending $200 even if ultimately the Wii was just a glorified Wii Sports machine that ended up gathering dust after a few months.
There’s a reason both Sony and Microsoft rushed out their own motion control systems and then just as quickly abandoned them and why Nintendo never really went back to them after the Wii. It was very much a fad. The very limited motion controls of the joycons in the switch are the last remnants of that design, but even Nintendo seems to have realized it’s a fairly niche control system that the Wii went a little too hard on.
Nintendo has always been willing to gamble a little and try unorthodox things with their game systems, be it the frankly bizarre controller of the N64, or the unusual lenticular lens of the 3DS, and the less said about the VirtualBoy the better. Sometimes those gambles paid off, sometimes not so much. Ultimately though I don’t think Nintendo’s decision to include motion controls in the Wii was some kind of grand strategy to appeal to a wider audience, rather I think it was just part of Nintendo’s policy of experimenting and willingness to try unusual things. So yes, in that regard Nintendo very much lucked out with the release of the Wii.
Touchscreens were absolutely not commonplace in mass market devices. There were absolutely a thing that existed, but they were associated to productivity devices and corporate things trying to look modern and fancy. I’d argue with no Nintendo DS you get no iPhone.
Nintendo’s pitch for the DS was that it wasn’t a Gameboy. The Advance was the Gameboy. This was the adult system for adults that used a touchscreen and you could hold it sideways and read it like a book. And they had Brain Age/Brain Training, based on some quack’s later disproved theories but that sounded and felt healthy and meant for older people who liked to do sudoku. Also, you want to do sudoku? You can do it here! There’s a pen and everything.
That “blue ocean” strategy on the DS and the absolutely insane success of it was the template for the Wii two years later. And it worked both times. They weren’t even shy about it, they are on the record a bunch explaining how they wanted to sell boring, grey DSs to people and then get them to buy games and become gamers instead. That ended up being what made Apple the biggest company in the universe, and it’s blow by blow the strategy Nintendo came up with. They are just too budget minded, so they attached that to a cheap console instead of an expensive mobile phone.
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.
I mean what console has survived as long as those OG Gamecubes
Uhhh the N64, SNES, PS1 to name a few
Yeah, I still have a NES and 2 SNES that work perfectly
Not a console, but I have a working Tandy 1000 from 1984.
Mobo in great condition and case isn’t even yellowed, whoever had it before me must have had it in a dark coat closet for 30 years.
PS1? Those disc drives were very fragile. Mine didn’t work unless I physically tilted console sideways after like 2 years of use.
For the PS1 disc drives, typically the issue is caused by a rubber band that hardens and falls apart over time. It’s a fairly easy replacement. That and greasing the rails.
My PS1 died before I got a PS2 :(
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of SNES still working today. I had one myself just a few years ago and sold it when I had a big move. So that’s a lifespan of about 25-33 years depending on when the existing units were produced.
The gamecube’s durability was known during that era: https://youtu.be/ioWnoOjP9IA?si=zPRczUBOp4p4oYCZ
Thank you for this. I remember parts of this skit to this day.
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GameCube was the Nokia of the gaming consoles. Actually, it probably still is.
Looks at OG Atari 2600 still chugging away on my gaming shelf after almost 40 years and chuckles.
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.
Eternal Darkness is an overrated game that looks pretty bad, I agree. It’s also early.
But no, what the hell are you talking about? Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, Killer 7, RE4… so many GC games specifically still hold up today, especially when played on a CRT. Most multiplatform releases looked closer to the Xbox versions and better than the PS2, and GC exclusives were hands down some of the best looking games of the generation.
Like someone else said, the issue was them insisting on proprietary formats with low capacity, which led to some low-effort compromised ports sometimes. But otherwise it was easily the most comparatively performant and consistently visually impressive Nintendo console since what? The SNES? I guess it depends on whether you thought the vaseline-smear look of the N64 sucked, which I did.
The reason Eternal Darkness looked bad was because it was developed as an N64 game. Dev time took soooo long, it released on the GameCube instead.
The vast, vast majority of GC games looked like ass because nobody seriously threw dev cycles at it. They didn’t have to because they knew kids would just buy any branded property and eat it up.
That is demonstrably false. The vast majority of GC games did absolutely NOT look like ass. At most, multiplatform ports didn’t look as good as they could have because both OG Xbox and GC were less of a priority and people led development on PS2, so multiplatform ports tended to be slightly elevated PS2 fare, rather than fully exploit the smaller two platforms. But also, both GC and Xbox had very nice looking first party releases, and like always with Nintendo, their aboslute army of first party developers was putting out visual bangers from day one. If anything the asset quality of many GC games has become more obvious over time, as the platform lives on through upscaled emulation.
At the time I played a bunch of multiplatform stuff on GC first when a port was available despite having a PS2 right there. My experience of being a multiplatform owner at the time was less that Cube ports were compromised, although some were, but that it was disappointing how many ports it just didn’t get at all, particularly as games started getting really asset-rich on the other platforms and fully max out a single layer DVD-5 or even ship on dual layer DVD-9s. Some people would do double disc GC releases, but nobody wanted to jam four whole discs in a box.
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.
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 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.
That’s how I got mine and realized how wrong I was about refusing to buy Wind Waker because kid Link was the protagonist. Bought it because Twilight Princess was coming out and I got a used Wind Waker copy for like $20 too.
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’m fairly certain Nintendo recently released new controllers that are compatible with Bluetooth and have the old cord input for the GC adapter\console they sold for WiiU\Switch. So controllers should be fairly available for you at least.
Check out the raspberry pi mods you can do now!
I still have mine and it works fine too! Great console. I still have an OG Xbox too.
