Author Topic: What's Old Is New - The GameCube  (Read 12073 times)

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Offline NWR_insanolord

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #25 on: November 24, 2013, 04:18:54 PM »
Wonderful 101 is a good example, I hadn't thought of that. Hopefully we'll see more of that kind of thing, although given that it seems to have sold very poorly I'm not exactly hopeful.
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Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #26 on: November 25, 2013, 11:39:32 AM »
I guess I don't get the hate for the 2 person carts. Wasn't physics tied to the cart?  I really can't remember. So in my mind it was basically an item switching mechanism that had little impact on the core game.

Sailing in Windwaker was a poor design choice but I didn't feel like it was a gimmick meant to get people to buy it. It was obviously boring and too long but the primary game was the dungeons. I thought the dungeons were awesome which made it easier to overlook the sailing.

I don't see how Gamecube was the start of over-saturation of Mario. Yes, he had a few more game cameos but the core series saw 1 game. I don't think Mario sports game devalue the brand any more than Mario underwear devalues the brand.  Mario is about platforming and when people get tired of Mario platforming games then Mario has a problem. The Wii had 3 core Mario games as does the Wii U. Plus their are a bunch on the DS and 3DS. Mario over saturation is a problem now but I think it came with the Wii and DS (which initially struggled against the PSP).  I think the commercial failure and loss of third party support in the Gamecube era led Nintendo to an us vs them approach on the Wii. Which led to them going to their core franchises too much.

Why is it assumed that these games were rushed to the market?  Is it because you didn't like these games as much as other games in the series?  Is it because ofbthe lack of sales?  Most games have some flaws and these were no exception. I just dont think that means the were rushed or weren't good games.

Offline Ian Sane

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #27 on: November 25, 2013, 01:57:36 PM »
On the N64 I assumed that Nintendo was pretty much the same company they had been in the NES and SNES years only they had completely shot themselves in the foot by sticking with cartridges.  This one huge mistake had handcuffed the N64 so severely that all the problems on the system appeared to be directly related to it.  The weak third party support, the expensive game prices, the long game droughts, the lack of fashionable elements of the time like FMV and red book audio - all of those were directly caused by the cartridges.  But Nintendo still made awesome games.  They were the best videogame developer in the world, bar none, and the fact that the system was still quite popular despite its shortcomings demonstrated that.  I figured if they had gone with CDs the train would have just kept rolling from the SNES days.  It was all just one mistake and on the Cube they would bounce back.

But that's not what happened and on the Cube I found out that Nintendo at some point had turned into clueless fuddy-duddies who could and would **** up anything.  Well this was the company that released the Virtual Boy and going with cartridges was an insanely stupid idea that I saw a mile away when I was just some 14 year old kid who doesn't run a multi-million dollar videogame company.  The sad truth is that sticking with cartridges was such an easily avoidable mistake that it should have clued me in that whatever company would make such a decision had something wrong going on upstairs.

So I found the Gamecube years very frustrating as Nintendo just botched their way to near irrelevance.  The real core of the problem was that their attitude was such like they never acknowledged that the N64 had problems.  It was like "we're Nintendo so people will just buy it, right?"  Now I would take the Cube over the Wii any day but what's frustrating is that Nintendo's whole approach to the Wii is largely based on the Cube's failure.  They lost the traditional market with the N64, completely botched their comeback attempt and then gave up like it was all hopeless the whole time and now they're a company I largely dislike.  The Gamecube was their chance to bounce back and for things to return to normal and instead it's really when everything completely derailed.

And one thing that really annoying is that when the Cube wasn't out yet and I was getting hyped up about it I was hyped about realistic Zelda, Dinosaur Planet, Perfect Dark and Too Human.  Zelda turned into a cartoon and realistic Zelda came out so late that it was a Wii launch title, Dino Planet turned into Star Fox and then Rare was gone so I got no PD and Too Human didn't show up until Nintendo and SK parted ways and ended up being crap.  I really thought Nintendo had the titles in place to compete and they systematically gutted it all away.  From its first reveal the Cube really generated a lot of optimism but I found that was just sucked out of me as time went on.  Go back and make a few slightly different decisions from 2000 to 2002 and Nintendo's whole history would be different and no one would be concerned about Wii U sales.

The Gamecube is a good system with good games but it could have been way better.  Though unlike the Wii it was still a time where I was legitimately excited for almost every major first party release.  And the Metroid Prime and Pikmin games are as good as any N64 classic.

Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #28 on: November 25, 2013, 04:38:40 PM »
You mentioned Pikmin, Prime, the Mario Galaxy series on the Wii gets high marks. 3d world and the new Zelda are tearing up reviews. Not every Nintendo game will be Epic.  You're in your thirties and 10, 000s of games have been developed since you started gaming. It's not imposible, but it will be harder and harder to get that wow moment that maybe Ocarina of Time gave you.

 I was dissapointed initially when Windwaker became a cartoon. Then I played it and I thought Nintendo made the right call. The graphics were amazing and the environments drew me into the game. At this point in gaming history none of the consoles did that great with realistic environments.

DP. I actually thought this was a decent Zelda clone and worthy of a playthrough. Star fox didn't make a whole lotta of sense and the flying parts ackward, but I don't think this is greatly improved by removing them.

Too Human  I think this game is the poster child for more development time doesn't equal better game. This and PD were not special. You can argue Nintendo could have made them special but I think that Nintendo unloaded a sinking ship in Rare. The void I felt was filled by Retro but still dissapointing to lose one developer to gain another instead of keeping them both.

I guess I feel like we are moving towards the third party argument that has been beat to death here. The Gamecube used 1.4 gb dvds instead of 4.7. Some games came with 2 discs and most games wouldn't use more than that unless they were fmv heavy. Disc size while a mistake isn't why the Gamecube failed. Purple probably wasn't the best color choice but ever since Sega had the Genesis the competitors always attacked Nintendo as kiddie so that was nothing new. So that's not the big failure. The big failure is the PS2 had like 3x as many games.

Nintendo did move away from traditional gaming and competing with the Wii. But that's not the Gamecubes fault. Nintendo made the wrong decision to do that and that decision was always going to come because they don't cater to third parties.

Nintendo didn't just become idiots during the cube era. They are frustrating consistent in their approach to third parties. Nes was high licensing fees and strong restrictions on games with Nintendo having veto power. But all the competitors went bankrupt in the vg crash so 3rd parties had no choice but to work with Nintendo. SNES led the market because of sequels to popular titles and brand loyalty from kids that had NESs. 3rd parties felt tied to Nintendo because it had the bigger marketshare. With N64 3rd parties were glad to jump ship to run from Nintendos policies. Sure carts were expensive but so were they license fees. I actually think that as much as the carts led to N64 losing to PS1. There was a time the N64 was ahead. I'm not sure what a 96meg cart cost to produce in 1997, but if the internet is to be believed Nintendo charged $38 to license/produce 1 N64 cart at 96 meg. I imagine a large majority of that was for licencing and went directly to Nintendos bottom line. I remember it being big news when Nintendo cut the cube licensing fees in half to match Sony/Microsoft. But it was too late PS2 was already market dominant and Microsoft was changing the game with moneyhats.

Microsoft/Sony are largely hardware companies looking to sell boxes to win the living room. They have 1st parties to the extent of supporting the hardware. Nintendo is a software company that sells hardware so you can use their software. Theyve never been interested in selling third party software. They stopped competing with the others because Microsoft changed the rules. Nintendo was afraid of a future where third parties had all the power and hardware wasn't profitable.

Nintendo was wrong but not the Cubes fault. Nintendo delivered a bunch of above average to excellent games during the Cubes life. This was also the last Nintendo console that had a handful of excellent third party exclusive titles.

Offline Mop it up

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #29 on: November 25, 2013, 05:50:13 PM »
Why is it assumed that these games were rushed to the market?
It isn't an assumption, Nintendo have admitted as much. The Wind Waker had two dungeons cut, and Sunshine had all the blue coins to make up for the lack of levels. As for Melee, well, there are too many things to list there, such as the half-baked adventure mode and the "clone" characters. I say this with Melee remaining my favourite GameCube game, and one of my most-played games of all time, but I'm not blind to its faults. Even Wind Waker and Sunshine I think are good games, just not up to the usual level of quality seen in most of the other games in their respective series.

Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #30 on: November 25, 2013, 06:23:30 PM »
I guess every game is rushed to some degree.  There are deadlines, most of the time not everything gets done that was planned.  Sometimes the team is able to get an extension, sometimes not.  Not to say those games are without fault but I think you are nitpicking to say they were rushed whereas others were not. 


Aonuma "“I’ve received many questions about additional content beyond what was in the GameCube version of the game, but our desire is to stay true of the story that was in the original. If we add dungeons then that will affect other parts of the GameCube version, which we really want to stay true to. If it felt like there were maybe too few dungeons then I feel that what was wrong with the GameCube version was the pacing. It was thrown off because it took longer to get to certain dungeons. There was a waiting period, and then when you arrived there the experience maybe didn’t feel as big, as you’d waited so long to get there. "


Aonoma doesn't feel it was rushed and indicated adding the two cut levels would change the game and they didn't want to add them in the HD version.  I don't know how this stuff gets leaked, but my guess is most of the Zelda's had some dungeons/parts hacked because they were not up to Nintendo quality and wouldn't add to the player experience. 


The blue coins are certainly annoying, but collecting items is the norm for Mario games and that was probably in from the start.  That game was shown at 2 straight E3s.  If it was rushed it was a mismanagement of resources, not a lack of time. 


I'm certainly not sayng SSBM is perfect, the adventure mode was tacked on.  Much like it was in Soul Calibur and other fighting games that have an adventure mode.  They could of spent enough time making an adventure mode that would be worthy of it's own game but I don't think that was the point of it.  Fighting games have been using clones for a long time to boost total fighters.  I mean let's make you manager.  Would you delay SSBM for 6 months to give it a more robust adventure mode that most people don't care about?  Would you delay SSBM for 6 months to get 2 more unique characters and re-balance the game and create new stages for them?  Which 2 characters that weren't in it would get people excited?  Do either of these things bring more sales in than would have been brought originally? 


Every game has deadlines and limited resources and thus quality compromises happen often.  I see no proof that Nintendo intentional rushed games or brought games to the market that weren't ready to fulfill gaps in their schedule. 

Offline Mop it up

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #31 on: November 25, 2013, 06:40:40 PM »
Of course they didn't use the word "rush" but it's clear from what they have said that that's what happened. If you don't want to believe what Nintendo have said there's nothing else to say, but to me those games definitely felt incomplete and had less content, and others in the series felt more complete.

Offline Ian Sane

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #32 on: November 25, 2013, 06:46:30 PM »
I am blind to SSB Melee's faults.  I thought the game was essentially perfect... and I didn't like the original SSB so Melee was so impressive it converted me.

One of the big complaints about the N64 was the drought time between games.  Yeah, that was something that needed to be addressed but Nintendo isn't so great at reading between the lines.  Rushing titles like Mario and Zelda was their response to this but it was obvious that the reason for the droughts was a lack of games and that was caused by a lack of third party support.  So "we don't want as much time between releases" really means "improve third party support" not "rush your games to get them out sooner".

But then I find the cure to what ails Nintendo is that they need to get along better with others and it sometimes feels like they come up with weird bizarre approaches to avoid addressing that.  Even when the company had good third party support they did so by abusing their position of power.  This "Nintendo vs. The World" attitude is ingrained in their corporate culture and changing something like that would be very hard.  Who wants to address their real problems if they can bullshit themselves and ignore them?  Do they want to admit that for the last 30 years they have jerked around third party publishers, retailers, the media and general videogame consumers?

Offline Mop it up

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #33 on: November 25, 2013, 06:53:22 PM »
Yeah, I didn't notice problems with Melee at first either, it was just so much fun, and it had a lot more to it than the N64 title. But I can only spend so much time with a game before critical thinking kicks in whether I want it to or not, and when that happened I started noticing a lot of things that weren't quite right.

Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #34 on: November 25, 2013, 08:12:37 PM »
Of course they didn't use the word "rush" but it's clear from what they have said that that's what happened. If you don't want to believe what Nintendo have said there's nothing else to say, but to me those games definitely felt incomplete and had less content, and others in the series felt more complete.


Okay, who from Nintendo said it was rushed?  I'm not ignoring it, I just don't see it.  Plus, it gets complicated who says it.  There are always people that work on games that may want more time to perfect things.  A couple month delay adds tweaks to games, not new levels or more content. 


They only released one Mario and one (kinda two) Zelda's.  I'm not sure how that fills their release schedule which is the reasoning for the rush.  Mario Sunshine released in July, so that could have easily been delayed several months and still hit the holiday season which wouldn't have effected sales.  Zelda was just rereleased for the Wii U with no additional content.  Both of these games for $20+ used still so they both seem well liked.  Plus looking over the Gamecube early lineup would make the Wii U blush lots of third party games to fill the release schedule.  Eternal Darkness and Animal Crossing are stand-outs that sandwiched it.  For example, the first full year of N64 had 34 total games released.  The Gamecube had 48 games released in 2002 BEFORE Super Mario Sunshine hit and 97 games after in in 2002.  It didn't initially have a games issue.  As the PS2 took over the market 3rd parties started leaving Nintendo. 

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #35 on: November 25, 2013, 08:40:11 PM »
The quote you had posted was about the HD version of Wind Waker. Of course they aren't going to add the two dungeons in because they already edited the game around them not existing, such as adding in the Triforce hunt, but pacing isn't why they were cut for the original release. The two dungeons were also redone to be used in other Zelda games, so it'd be a little redundant to add them in now. If you want to see them actually use the word "rushed" then here's a quote I found:

Quote from: Aonuma
Something else that's important to mention is that usually on a game we'll have two to three composers, but this time we actually bumped it up to five to six people. Essentially, we've more than doubled the number of people. Part of the reasoning behind that was the rushed development schedule, but we also wanted to have very high sound quality in The Wind Waker.

http://www.gamecubicle.com/interview-legend_of_zelda_wind_waker_miyamoto.htm

Also of note, I'm not trying to convince anyone to dislike the GameCube, simply explaining why it was my least-favourite era and why I don't want it to return. I didn't feel the games were designed around good concepts and I didn't feel they had as much effort put into them as before. If others feel differently, that's their prerogative and I'm not out to change it.

Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #36 on: November 25, 2013, 09:14:32 PM »
"We've more than doubled the number of people."


Like I said all games are given deadlines.  They had a tighter deadline and it appears they staffed at what they felt was an appropriate level to make that deadline happen.  It's not like they picked these people off the street, these people were probably taken off of other Nintendo teams and those projects put on hold meaning there was probably not actual any more games developed with this approach.  It just got Zelda done faster in leui of another project.  And the tight deadline for Zelda isn't too unbelievable because that was released before Christmas a crucial time period for games. 


They didn't have to add those other two dungeons but they could have added more content if they thought it was lacking in content.  A $50 rerelease isn't exactly a bargain and they only spent 6 months on it.  Plus I'm more than sure those dungeons were tweaked in future releases and they might have been able to make minimal tweaks on them to seem different enough that the released editions. 


Your opinion is this era was rushed.  I'm fine with your opinion and I'm not trying to change it.  I just don't like the indication that the entire generation is obviously rushed because I believe that to be false.  I liked Mario 64 better than Sunshine and I'd put Ocarina and Windwaker equal.  Other than that my opinion is the Gamecube era was better than the 64 era.  But that's just my opinion. 

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #37 on: November 25, 2013, 09:18:41 PM »
I think there was a misunderstanding then because I never stated that the entire generation was rushed, I pointed to three examples and stuck with those. Those were three of the biggest games on the system though, so even if just three games, that's a big part of the GameCube's legacy.

Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #38 on: December 15, 2013, 02:27:38 AM »
I'm glad to see Rogue Leader, my first GameCube game getting some recognition. You think the first Death Star was challenging? Wait until the (inevitable) Battle of Endor (seriously, that **** is near-impossible). Then try re-playing for even silver rankings on everything. This game is easily one of LucasArts' best.


Don't waste your time with Rogue Leader II though—they tried to use the same game engine to create a game where you often find yourself either piloting sluggish ground-based repulsorlift vehicles (painfully boring) or on-foot (the controls and progression of this mechanic are horrendous). The game was so disappointing that I leant my copy to a friend in college and never asked him to return it.

Offline Ian Sane

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Re: What's Old Is New - The GameCube
« Reply #39 on: December 16, 2013, 02:04:30 PM »
The sequel is actually worth buying just for the multiplayer mode as it is literally just two player versions of Rogue Leader's single player mode.  At the time I paid too much for it but today it's probably cheap enough to get both titles used and think of them as two parts of a greater whole.  Just don't play Rebel Strike's single player as it is a mess.

I think Rogue Leader could have been a big killer app for the Cube if it was just marketed as such.  There had never been a more authentic Star Wars experience when this came out.  It also wasn't a "kiddy" game but was still family friendly.  It was the sort of game a Playstation owner would be jealous of and wouldn't that be the very type of game to emphasize?  But instead Nintendo promoted Luigi's Mansion while Rogue Leader got like a second of footage in a general ad covering multiple titles.  *Sigh*

This was the first Cube title I ever bought and I actually got it before the Cube came out as a few third party games made it to stores a few days prior to launch.  So I took it home and read every word in the instruction manual in anticipation for the eventual release.  My parents probably thought I was a lunatic to buy a game I could not possibly play.  The Cube was the first console I actually could afford to buy at launch with my own money so that made the whole launch experience that much more exciting.