In the age of PS2 and Xbox, I was a Gamecube gamer

I am quite certain that I am in the minority when I talk about which console I decided to get involved with in the early 2000's because the PS2 was absolutely dominating the market. Most of my life I have subconsciously tried to be a bit "different" from my peers but my decision to buy a Gamecube that fated day at Toys R Us wasn't really determined by this notion. I decided to get a Gamecube for a number of reasons but the main one was that it was cheaper than Xbox or PS2.

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When I purchased it the list price was $199 (we love our nines in USA because it is obviously just over $100 at that price) but Toys R Us was having a special where the unit was $159. At the time both the Xbox and the PS2 were over $200, so the main determining factor in my purchase decision was to save a bit of money.

Also, in the many years of gaming that came before, I had fallen in love with a few franchise characters that I know that Nintendo was not going to allow on other consoles such as Mario, Metroid, and Zelda games. These respective franchises have resulted in some of the greatest games ever made IMO and I knew that if I purchased either of the other two systems I was going to miss out on them. This turned out to be a mistake (again, IMO) in regards to all of these titles except for one.

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When the long-awaited Zelda: The Wind Waker game was released in March of 2003 - which was likely right around the time I purchased the system - I was more than a little disappointed. I, like many Zelda fans, had hoped they would continue along the path of Ocarina of Time but with better graphics and sound. Instead we got a completely different art style that for me and many other fans, just pissed us off.

The gameplay was solid but the story was cartoonish as were a majority of the enemies. I also didn't like how crucial it was to remember the tunes that you play on your flute especially when you had all the tunes in your "inventory" but it still required you to play them without assistance to make something happen. It all seemed a bit pointless to me.

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Super Mario Sunshine was a highly anticipated game as well (as one would expect) and most critics praised its innovative gameplay that was very different than other Mario games that had come before. Maybe it is because I am old-school but for the most part I hated the new features of spraying everything with a water cannon. The main reason being that you would run out of water frequently and had to return to a source in order to "reload." This meant you were always doing a ton of backtracking and once again, I would have preferred if they had just evolved Super Mario 64 and just made it more crisp with their new and far more powerful technology.

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Another downside of the Gamecube was the fact that the disks weren't capable of holding enough data for many of the games and this was a real step backwards in my mind. For some of the games once you progressed beyond a certain point you had to insert disc 2 and in any sort of long game such as Resident Evil 4 this could actually result in you needing to swap the discs in and out multiple times if you ever decided to backtrack - which of course wasn't necessary - but could happen. On a side note: RE4 was originally intended to be a Gamecube exclusive and almost certainly resulted in a surge in late sales for the system in 2005, but later than year Capcom ported it to the PS2, which was probably a very wise move on their part since PS2 was and still is the best selling home console of all time.

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I believe the best game that this system ever saw was Metroid Prime and i was just fantastic from start to finish. As someone that was a massive fan of the previous releases, even when you had to enter magnificently long codes in order to "save your game" back on the NES, I was really looking forward to this one. Unlike Mario and Zelda, they didn't stray from the original nuances of the classic games and the end result was absolutely perfect. Consequently, the boss fight featured above against Meta Ridley is IMO the most difficult part of the game despite not being the final boss.

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I don't understand Nintendo's decision to make the discs smol, but since they were focused on the "cube" design, making it able to accommodate full-size discs would have made it the Gamebox and it would have been pretty large. I think they were going for a more sleek and unique design that set them apart from the PS2 (which was still sexy as hell) and the Xbox (an absolute beast in terms of size and weight.) Furthermore, I think that they were attempting to prevent people from copying the games with burners even though the smol disks were later made available for sale. I remember trying to copy the games and they wouldn't play. People had workaround but it involved dicking around with the hardware and that wasn't something I was prepared to do.

I still have my Gamecube, but the motor that spins the disks no longer functions and while I am sure there is someone out there that could repair it, I don't care enough to actually make that happen.

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_{Oddly enough, I personally feel as though the Dreamcast was a better console than all of them, but Sega had already fallen too far from grace to recover after a decade of disastrous decisions}

The much lower than expected sales of this console scared Nintendo because after years of being a dominant player in the game they suddenly found themselves in a distant 3rd place with the PS2 selling many times more consoles. They must have some tremendous management over at Nintendo because the Wii, which seemed completely absurd when it was released, ended up outselling everyone else and the games appealed to people that are not gamers. I really didn't care for it to be honest and never purchased one.

Were you a Gamecuber? What did you think of it?