Complete History of Gamecube article

Yes but in the end, look at where they are now. Sony/MS have much more robust online networks, Nintendo is years behind.

 

Amazing read. Good find

 

Great amount of info thank you

 

Fantastic, thanks for sharing, very very interesting read.

 

That's because you're American!

Start at the beginning... first damn sentence:

Er, no. Horrible, horrible Americanism. NEVER use two prepositions together. It's "Inside the Peacock Room". On that topic, off is never followed by of. Terrible English, that! [EDIT: And so is ending a sentence with a preposition! Oops!] If inside is used as a noun, however, it's acceptable:

The inside of the TARDIS is bigger than the outside!

Nope. Silicon Graphics is a company, so it is a proper noun. However, we're talking about the chairman of the company, so it becomes possessive. It's "Silicon Graphics' chairman" - and that's just two examples in the first sentence.

The second sentence changes tense, then goes back in the third. Jim Clark announced an agreement in the first sentence (past tense), an animated Mario is projected in the second sentence (present tense) and then a quote in the third sentence, said Mario (past tense again). Sentence four then has a quote that doesn't have a space between the comma and quotation mark,"like this". And sentences five and six were preceded by a double space, although she used single spaces after her first few sentences. If you want good readability, the piece has to flow - and for that, you need uniformity. You need to think about what tense you're using, and not chop and change. Likewise, whether you choose to double-space after a full stop or only use a single space (most publications tend to adopt the latter nowadays), you need to stick to one. And don't omit spaces where they should be - or any punctuation, of course! Remember that the next time you exclaim, "Let's eat out Mum!"

 

I agree with you 100%, but I'm not sure it would of changed Gamecube sales. I get what you are saying, as a future investment it made logical sense. But... Nintendo is a relatively small company (when compared to Microsoft and Sony) and to pony up the funds for something that wasn't being used by a majority of the market at the time was just too big of risk. (Especially after the semi-failure of the N64DD.)

 

Amazing article! Love the insights on 3rd party relations and trying to make the controller perfect.

 

And boy did they succeed to make the controller (near) perfect. For some reason the d-pad really does feel like somewhat of an afterthought but everything else (even the hated c-stick) is awesome in my opinion. Neither the wiimote nor the wii u pad bested it in terms of pure playability, despite their motion and touch gimmicks.

 

Yeah, the c-stick complaints are something I've never followed, either. In my opinion, every shooter game that was released on Gamecube controlled much more smoothly than the PS2 counterpart. It isn't so much to do with the shape of the stick as it is sensitivity, but the size never once bothered me.

 

I want my GameCube Rouge Squadron games ported already.

 

To me the mist interesting part is where the (ex)-Rare employees say that before they moved to Microsoft they were really looking forward to it, as they felt Microsoft would be less controlling than Nintendo, but when they went over to Microsoft they found M$ to be much more controlling than Nintendo ever were, so much so that M$ effectively crushed a number of (seemingly very promising) projects that were at various stages of completion, as M$ wanted Rare to concentrate on 'family friendly' games.

It's no wonder Rare are a shadow of their former selves. To me, Rare in the N64 years were the best software house of all time. Their N64 were often phenomenal. But even though I love the 360 (it's my favourite of the 360/PS3/Wii generation) and am interested in XBox One games (in case any are so appealing to me that I have to buy an XBox One), I don't make any effort to see what Rare are bringing out, as I have no faith that any more games they make will appeal to me. Compare that to the N64 days, when I eagerly sought out any information about their upcoming games.

And the bliss of getting Perfect Dark, which was probably the single game I'd most looked forward to ever (before or since then), and finding out it not only was as good as I'd hoped, but it was actually *so* much better.

Granted even if Rare had stayed with Nintendo, they might have gone downhill quality-wise. But whether or not they would, they have under Microsoft.

On a tangent, another reason I'm so displeased that Rare are now owned by Microsoft is that Microsoft are so ungenerous with their software and IP. Rare began life as a company called "Ultimate: Play the Game", writing games for the ZX Spectrum (a 1980's British home computer, sort of like the British equivalent of the Commodore 64) and the website The World of Spectrum (http://worldofspectrum.org/) there's a massive ongoing project to get permission to get as many Spectrum games as possible available for legal download. They've asked hundred of authors and companies, and Rare are one of the few companies who have said "No". And since Microsoft now own Rare, that refusal is not likely to change.

Plus I always had the hope (well, more of a remote, reality defying daydream, sadly) that Rare would one day release the source code for their games, as id Software, 3D Realms, and a (sadly extremely) few other companies have done. That way those games could be compiled to run natively on other consoles, handheld, and on the PC, so we could play them on so many machines, and add features like 'net-play, better graphics, more options, etc. I mean, imagine Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Blast Corps, Diddy Kong Racing, Killer Instinct Gold, and Mickey's Speedway Racer*, being playable on any machine you choose, plus with fan made improvements too!

But since Microsoft now own Rare, that extremely unlikely occurrence has reduced to almost nil. Still, if I saved Bill Gate's life, and he said he'd do anything to reward me, I'd ask for Rare's games to have their source code released.


* I don't like fighting games, so I've not played Killer Instinct Gold, and I don't even know if Mickey's Speedway Racer was released on PAL format (I've never seen it), so I've not played that either.

 

It's not complete without a story about how my cheating of Phantasy Star Online, blabbing too much in online chat rooms, and the release of the Xbox version of PSO bootstrapped the eventual cracking of the GameCube.

Evidence of what I'm saying: ever wondered why the source code to the GC BBA loader has x86 register names as variable names in the reverse-engineered PSO encryption code, rather than PowerPC?