GameCube retrospective – Drew’s Picks

The GameCube — or BlingCube, as my Platinum Edition was named — was the center of video game entertainment all through my college years. What started with My first roommate’s GameCube (the sole purpose of which was to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and various James Bond games that weren’t as good as Goldeneye) just erupted into my longest-running and warmest memories of social gaming.

While it’s tempting to just fill this list with all the fun party games I procrastinated on studying with, I decided to strike a balance by banning multiplatform titles. As fun as Burnout 2’s crash mode was, this is a GameCube retrospective. It deserves GameCube exclusives.

…It’s also a stark reminder of everything we have lost for want of GameCube rereleases on the Nintendo eShop.

Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest

I don’t know, it just seemed appropriate for a GameCube list.

When Atlus publishes a game with a weird title, you know what you’re in for. And you sure got it with this. I go so far as to call Cubivore the Game Cube’s Katamari Damacy… Though I’ll understand if you’d rather toss that crown at Odama.

I’ve never seen the look or feel of Cubivore before, and I haven’t since even seen an indie title replicate more than a piece of its core gameplay. That fact this is has a great aesthetic and a quirky sense of humor about everything only elevates it more.

In Cubivore, you must eat your way to the top. Starting off as a humble square, by taking down other predators, you can add their panels to yourself, evolving into all sorts of multi-sided monsters. You must also compete to reproduce, and eventually become not only an apex predator, but out-compete all the other iterations of your species. You must always be looking for the right competitor to eat, though. You’ll find some shapes and properties are better suited toward taking down some of your more dangerous rivals.

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Don’t watch this all the way through if you don’t want to spoil some of the game’s best surprises.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

I know everybody’s all excited for Resident Evil 2 again, but this could very well be the greatest survival horror game of all time.

First off, the game has a beautifully crafted narrative that works very well in the gaming medium. You inherit your uncle’s house after he presumably dies while off researching… some thing. Deep in the basement, you find the Tome of Eternal Darkness, which records endless stories of those who encountered and tired to defeat the darkness, only to instead be destroyed by it. With each story, you leave the framing narrative and travel to various far off lands in various time periods to play out these encounters. You fight demonic monsters, solve environmental puzzles and try to learn more about the eldritch horror (there are three to choose from at the start of the game. The story remains the same, but the ancient evil du jour has a profound influence on the enemies you encounter).

After each tragic tale of inevitable failure, you take a break from the book only to discover that a similar puzzle to one of the ones you just read about also exists in the house; set by your uncle to help propel you into becoming (hopefully) the final, successful hero.

While that’s all well and good, what the game is known best for (aside from innumerable Easter eggs for H.P. Lovecraft fans. I’m not one, but my friends were more than happy to point them all out) is its depiction of damage to your sanity.

You see, you have three resource meters to manage. First there’s your typical pair of HHP and MP which will drain in the customary way. But the third is sanity. Seeing things that should not be (e.g. monsters and magic) takes its toll. It’s more than just stress; it’s hurting your very perception of reality. While there are plenty of ways these effects play out from the perspective of your character, the real cleverness is that as that sanity bar ebbs, the game becomes increasingly likely to start affecting YOU.

It’ll use your surround sound to whisper in your ear. It’ll mute the sound or pretend the TV has turned off. And it has far more fiendish tricks than that in store…

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Rogue Leader/Rebel Strike

The first time I played Rogue Leader, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I hadn’t seen anything like this in a video game before. I was ready to declare the graphics &mdsh; as produced by a 162 MHz GPU with 4 mapping units, 4 texture units and a 24MB of VRAM — as good as the movie. The word “photorealistic” was dropped many times.

It sucked me right in to the experience. The storage of the GameCube disk, while needlessly smaller than a proper DVD, was plenty enough to fit a properly orchestrated covers of the classic John Williams soundtracks.

And the game was fun too, thank goodness.

While I wouldn’t call other games in the GameCube lineup, the fact remains that any game on the system that had a budget pushed graphical fidelity it has no business achieving compared to the allegedly more powerful competing consoles. Another great example is Metroid Prime… but you’ll be hearing more about that later.

Rebel Strike gets a nod here not because its added ground combat stages were good (they were terrifyingly bad), but for including a two-player cooperative version of Rogue Leader.

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Star Fox Assault

Now, imagine if Rebel Strike’s mixture of ground and flight combat actually worked, and you’d get Star Fox Assault.

You even get a beautiful orchestrated soundtrack through, including an unsurpassable version of the Star Wolf theme that alone is worth the price of admission.

About the only nay-saying I can do here is complain they went for quality over quantity; there are no branching paths to take, and some of the missions take a looooooong time to finish. I suppose I could also bellyache about how the story wants to be downright apocalyptic, but keeps pulling its punches at the last second. Here’s a lesson to take to heart: If you’re not willing to go Gainax, you shouldn’t bother flirting with it.

But none of that changes that the game delivers the rock-solid gameplay we demand from a Star Fox game (side-eye at you, Zero). All the fine dressing is gravy. Also, I need to stop writing metaphors when I’m hungry.

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One for the road: Super Smash Bros. Melee

There’s really nothing more to be said on this one that I haven’t already said in my Smash Bros. retrospective, so I’m just leaving a link here.