Is The Gamecube Nintendo's Worst Home Console?

The Gamecube is the weakest link in Nintendo's chain of home consoles, demonstrating that even the mighty Shigsy is fallible. Mediocre at best, Nintendo's purple cube failed to deliver anything near as revolutionary or innovative as its predecessors (or its motion controlled successor).

Yes, the Gamecube offered us some genuine flourishes of excellence. Pikmin was an enchanted oddity and a game that, undeservedly, went largely unnoticed by the public, buried beneath the usual batch of mainstream mediocrity. It was a rose among the weeds but not the rich assorted topiary of creativity we have come to expect from Nintendo. It was simply not enough.

Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine, despite both being solid accomplished games, were the weakest in their franchise. The FLUDD? What was Shigsy thinking? Yoshi aside, Mario is a solo performer capable of bouncing on bonces and bashing bricks unaided. The FLUDD seemed to diminish him somehow. Another gripe: his surroundings were based in reality.

"A strange plane has brought him from his home, an escapist, jolly nonsense-land where the hills have eyes to a world very much more like our own" - EDGE magazine.

Mario belongs in the Mushroom Kingdom or at least in a world that is not weighed down by the baggage of reality. And the tedious boating excursions in the Wind Waker were a cheap and tedious stunt to prolong the life of the game.

And consider this: the Gamecube was the first Nintendo console for which the 'killer app' was not a game made by Nintendo, but instead came from third party developer Capcom in the form of Resident Evil 4.

If you need more persuasion simply pick up a copy of any NGamer and cast your eyes over their Top Ten Gamecube Games Ever Made. Resi 4 clearly holds the top spot. This is utterly unprecedented and speaks absolute volumes about the Gamecube's output and creativity during this period. And Super Mario Sunshine, Nintendo’s follow up to the revolutionary Super Mario 64, is no where to be seen! A top ten bereft of a traditional Mario platformer? Unheard of.

Compelling evidence, don’t you think?

Nintendo’s biggest crime was the failure to deliver upon their unique selling point: the promise of the ‘Nintendo Difference’. The difference in this instance was the lack of a truly memorable Nintendo game.

I agree that Resident Evil 4 was sublime, a game that made the GameCube an essential purchase, but it’s a worrying sign when a third party trumps anything Nintendo produced in the course of its console's life. I’m not dismissing the GameCube as an absolute failure but this was the first time that my hunger for gaming had not been satisfied by the Big N. I found myself looking elsewhere, and I can safely say that not one game on the GameCube could rival the brain melting brilliance of Halo: Comabt Evolved on the XBox.

The GameCube was the only Nintendo console that I sold on (yet I still have my Dreamcast). And the glut of GameCubes’s clogging up the window of every CEX I walk past shows that I’m not the only one who took this step. In fact, and this is truly offensive, I even stopped buying NGC for a small while (my favourite ever Nintendo Magazine), disillusioned as I was by the multitude of mediocrity filling Nintendo’s shelf space.

When the most influential Nintendo Magazine has Mario Party 4 as its front cover (check out issue 75 of NGC) times must be very desperate indeed.