A Return - And Defender

Wow.

Ostensibly, I started this blog because writing about the vast library of GameCube games I had would be easy. With about 50ish (I think) games in my collection, game reviews, theories, music critiques, etc... would be no problem.

Except for procrastination.

Ah well. It's the New Year, so it's time to try again! This time, I found a game at a local game store and took a risk. That game?

Defender.

Good? Bad? We'll see

I was initially expecting the game to be horrible, owing to both its $2.85 asking price and the previous example of other 3D remakes/reboots going horribly wrong (namely, Bomberman: Act Zero. And maybe Bubsy 3D if I want to stretch my definition a bit.) Still, the same store had a copy of one of the original Sonic games for under $5, so prices wasn't a necessary indicator of quality.

Starting off, there are some cinematics. I suppose that should be expected for a modern 3D game. I didn't pay much attention to the idle-screen one, just enough to know that we're a special force that protects people from aliens. In-game, there is a grumpy-type military guy that is putting us through training.

The game controls decently. Not enough to write home about, but enough to have fun. (Regrettably, I don't think the axis inversion is adjustable. :( ) Flying around the first few training missions was fun, and the main weapon even has similar sound effects to those of the original's!

I stopped at the end of the training, since that was enough to get a taste of the game. More to follow soon, hopefully!

Paper Mario: Post-Finale Quest - The Beginning

Recently, I have discovered the website Backloggery. (Basically, it lets you list all your games and if you've beaten them or not. I ... still have a lot of games to enter in.) One of the few Gamecube games that I had finished was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (TTYD).

<3

But I had never completed it. There was always one big thing standing in my way: The Pit of 100 Trials.

Additionally, Satoru Iwata, executive producer of TTYD, recently passed away. Iwata played a major role in many significant Nintendo games over the years, including my favorite entry in the Paper Mario series. So, I began...

Part 1: Beginnings

I've finished the game several times, so I was fortunate enough to have a save file resting on my GCN memory card. I begin my quest with a level 27 Mario, all the partners, and almost all of the upgrades for the partners.

Time to start with the boring stuff. In Rogueport, just two houses away from Prof. Frankly's place, is the Trouble Center. Random NPCs ask you to do stuff for them, ranging from a short jog across town, a fetch quest, to another unnecessary, bloated, overly-long trek to locate General White for a second stinking time.

General of what? Hide and seek?

Seriously! This guy's "quest" is one of the few things that I hate about the game. And we ALWAYS find him in his house. After going to all corners of the world!

Indeed

Ahem.

The other quests, including longer fetch quests, were not as bad as this one. Grab an item, bring it to the person in need, get your reward. Only a few of the leftover missions were compelling, as I had already finished the quest that rewarded me with a bonus partner character.

A thief in the night. Just like the mice in MY house!

One of the quests, however, was a bit more challenging than the rest. Poor little Pine T. Jr. lost his dad to The Pit of 100 Trials. The hardest challenge in the entire game, in the hardest area in the entire game, ending in the hardest boss in the entire game.

Oh dear.

Fortunately, there's still a bit of other stuff to do before my final challenge. More developments as they occur. Stay tuned, folks.

Wind Waker; or, My First Zelda

I was never good at NES games. The original Zelda, Castlevania and Mega Man entries still elude me. More specifically, I could barely get past the first screen in The Legend of Zelda for the NES:

I saw this screen a lot

I recently tried to play it again, and actually managed to beat 3 dungeons before taking a break. In N64 land, I had never come across Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask in the wild, so I hadn't owned them either. It hadn't helped that I got the N64 as the system was being phased out of our local Blockbuster.

RIP - I spent my summer paychecks here

However, I got my Gamecube for Christmas, during its lifespan. One game that I was given for it The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. For me, it ranks in the my top 5 of Gamecube games, along with Super Mario Sunshine and Paper Mario 2. However, enough with top 5s.

Since Wind Waker (WW) was my first Zelda game that I played and enjoyed, I never understood the hate that it got. I still don't, but it doesn't seem as prevalent anymore. Sure, the sailing bits could get a bit tiresome, but it was still a bit fun. Exploration! Discovering secret islands! All that jazz.

Link, you've got to find Ganon's secret base!

Because of WW, I came to appreciate 3D Zelda games and would later beat Twilight Princess. I don't have a life story about how the game changed my life, but in my early years of downloading video game sheet music and midis, WW's music was in the mix. Those sites lead me to other great music, and even to the games of those pieces.

Wind Waker's a fun game, and the end boss fight is pretty satisfying.

The end.

Why a Cube?

Thank goodness it wasn't GameSphere...

...or else I'd lose it all the time!

The most striking thing about the GameCube is its shape - hence the name. However, given the appearance of the previous systems of both Nintendo and the competition, it is a striking contrast. How did Nintendo decide on this bold move? Why did they do so? I determined to find out why.

I knew already that the Nintendo GameCube started life as Project Dolphin - a fact referenced in Super Mario Sunshine's own Isle Delfino. Oddly enough, the first IGN article indicated that Nintendo's new console would top the PS2 in terms of graphics. I'm not sure how well they knew the PlayStation 2, but owning to their experiences with the SNES and the original PlayStation project, I'm sure Nintendo had a little bit more than just a random guess.

Still, that didn't tell me what I wanted to know. It was called "Project Dolphin," but the end product was a small cube-shaped gaming console. When or where did they decide the shape?

My first instinct was to check the issue of Nintendo Power I had on my shelf - however, I only had back to 2004. I tried searching for issues online to no avail. Then I remembered the Wayback Machine! Surely the archived pages of Nintendo's own website would have something?

I learned a few interesting things. On the feature page for Spaceworld 2000, Nintendo.com featured this paragraph in particular:

Instead of going for the highest possible performance, which does not contribute to software development, our idea was to create a developer-friendly next generation TV game machine that maintained above-standard capabilities.

As of late, Nintendo isn't known for out-powering the competition in terms of processing and graphical power. It's interesting to see that this strategy was intentional, at least for the Nintendo GameCube. This particular page indicates that the 'Cube was designed to counter the difficult of programming that came with its predecessor, the N64. Nice to know, but it still didn't answer my question!

Finally, on a FAQ for E3 2001, I managed to find some solid information. First, in response to the question "What is the size of the NINTENDO GAMECUBE system?" the page replies that it is small for the sake of "giving players more freedom to place the system where they most want it to go." Additionally, when answering a question about the proprietary discs, it is noted that "[GCN] discs are small enough to allow for the console's extremely compact dimensions while building in a layer of counterfeit protection that isn't available on standard DVD."

With that page, I'm halfway to answering my question. It's small in order to save space and prevent piracy. (I've never looked into home-brew GCN stuff, so I don't actually know how well that worked out for them!) Yet, the PS1 update for Sony's system was a compact design, but not a regular geometric figure. In a last ditch effort, I did an image search for the insides of a GameCube.

Nice and compact

From the previous information and the picture, I'd finally arrived at my conclusion: the GameCube was that shape for two reasons. The first reason, given by Nintendo itself, was ostensibly for ease of storage and because of the disc format's small area. The second reason is apparent from the innards of the console itself: the cube is the smallest, box-like shape possible given the necessary components. Rectangles had been done for years before. A pyramid shape would be dangerous and most likely waste the space at the tip. Therefore, in order to make a unique system and still squeeze in all the guts, the Nintendo GameCube simply had to be a cube.

Thanks for reading!

(P.S. If you'd like to see a deconstruction of an actual GameCube, this page has pictures of a console being disassembled, with handy color coded labels to indicate varying components.)

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Works Cited/Referenced:
http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/05/05/say-hello-to-project-dolphin
http://web.archive.org/web/20001119232600/http://www.nintendo.com/spaceworld/ngc.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010523001344/http://www.nintendo.com/news/news_articles.jsp?articleID=3921
http://www.gamesx.com/misctech/gamecube.htm

GameCube Nostalgia

I've decided to get the most nostalgia I can out of the way in this first article. It'll be present in later posts, no doubt, but today I'd like to really reflect on my lovely purple box.

Mine looked much like this, sans the memory card

In the early 2000s, I had but a few game systems. There was the Sega Pico that we got who knows when, and the Dreamcast that we got close to the end of the console's lifetime. And a PlayStation also, I think. However, we had rarely gotten new systems.

The GameCube comes out in 2001, but despite its lower price, is too expensive for us, at least initially. Eventually, they either splurged or found it cheaper, because come Christmas, I had my very own purple cube of fun. Despite not being the official launch title, my first GCN gaming experiences came from the system's main Mario game, Super Mario Sunshine.

Mine looked just like this

My first platforming ventures were not with Super Mario Bros or even Super Mario 64, but this FLUDD-assisted romp across a tropical paradise. I never beat the game 100%, as the blue coins were something else to find sometimes. Still, it was a great game and made good use of the controller.

A thing of beauty

I always liked platformers on the GameCube because of the controller. It always felt just right, when running around as Mario or rolling around as Sonic. The addiction even lasted into the Wii years, with the Mario Kart entry on that system.

Back to GCN matters, I'll close by bringing up my favorite GameCube game:

A superb game

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was one of my first experiences with the RPG genre. It wasn't too difficult and had enough unique stuff to make it its own game. Over the years, I've played through the game at least 4-5 times: the characters are silly, the plot is a little better than those of the platformers (Spoilers: Bowser didn't do the kidnapping this time!) and the different areas are quirky and fun to explore. But that's all I'll say for now - gotta save it for a full article later!

Anyway, now that my ramble-y nostalgia article is over, I look forward to full-fledged reviews and discussions of GameCube stuff in the future! Till then, "Later mans!"

Junkyard: The Next Generation

Inspired by my comrades at Dreamcast Junkyard, and the blokes over at the Sega Master System Junkyard, Saturn Junkyard, etc... I have decided to start my own Junkyard-style blog. Whether this'll go anywhere is a completely different story. Anyway!

It was almost a difficult decision which console to pick. Do I choose the Xbox, which seems to be a sort of spiritual successor to the Dreamcast? Or the home of Final Fantasy X, the PlayStation 2? Or even the SG-1000, which I don't own. (Well, probably not the last one.) I thought about these and more. For a few seconds.

For whatever reason, I have stacks of games for the GameCube. No, not hundreds, but upwards towards the 50-60 range. Many of my favorite franchises have great entries on the system, like Paper Mario 2, Sonic Adventure DX, Luigi's Mansion, and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, to name a few. With so many games, I have a large potential for articles.

I look forward to sharing my GameCube and GameCube related memories, or new discoveries and trivia, with you all! See you soon.