Top Gamecube Games

The Tuesday feature brings us the Top 15 games from the Nintendo Gamecube. Yes there were 15 good games for this system, despite the much-maligned criticism of the Cube. The fact that the Wii is backwards compatible to the mini-discs of this system will help these games continue to see play for the next few years.

15. Star Wars Rogue Leader - It had been quite a number of years since a Star Wars game blew me away, but this game was outstanding. Early in the life of Gamecube, this was a game that saw a majority of play time on many Cubes. Good for kids and adults, this is a sleeper on the list.

14. Super Monkey Ball 2 - The original may be on many people's lists, but SMB2 channels the greatness of the old game Marble Madness and adds a level of 3D complexity to that genre not seen before. This game is so good they rushed out another for the Wii launch, so hopefully there will be more in this series.

13. Resident Evil 4 - Same argument as the Wii version, except on GCN the game is simply a port of the PS2 and Xbox versions. Still a great game worth looking into if you prefer the traditional controllers.

12. Timesplitters 2 - A friend introduced this gem to me on the PS2, but the GCN version is just as good if not better. Timesplitters reminds me a lot of Goldeneye 007 which is a good thing for those who like mission-based spy type first person shooters. A nice story to back up the traveling to different time periods keeps the game varied and fresh.

11. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - Every trio of games or movies has to have a dark middle tale, and the Metroid Prime series got just that in Echoes. This game is much like the original, with the only problem being that the designers should have gone further in developing the series.

10. Resident Evil - While RE4 gets a lot of press for being quality, the first Umbrella Corp zombie battle is a classic not to be missed. Cheap scares abound as well in this surprisingly successful hit.

9. Super Mario Sunshine - While most other systems launch with a Mario game alongside, GCN decided to launch with a Luigi game instead. While we all love Luigi, Sunshine was only disappointing in that the gameplay did not improve much over Luigi's Mansion. The game is a noble addition to the Mario line, but will probably fade to obscurity over time.

8. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - The 2D Mario series continues to impress with this entry and certainly provides more than the platformer at #9.

7. Mario Party 7 - GCN had an amazing 4 Mario Party games come out in 5 years, and that is just too many. While the market was saturated, the minigames themselves really got better in this one. With a little more work on the graphics and board gameplay, this series could have gone to greater heights.

6. Super Smash Bros Melee - Many people would put this in the top 3 for sure, but I just am not huge into the fighting genre. This is a fun game to play but is only more fun than Mortal Combat and Street Fighter because the characters are Nintendo classics. Still the controls are almost perfect and the boards are nicely interactive, so the gfame ranks high even for me.

5. Animal Crossing - While pulling weeds, fishing, running errands for others, and building up and decorating a house may not be an adequate escape from real life for some, this game is terribly addictive to those who like the SimCity or Sims genre. While the characters do look childish and doofy, the gameplay is actually very fun. The kicker that puts this in the top 5 is the ability to carry characters and designs to your friends' Animal Crossing neighborhoods. The interactivity with real time is awesome also.

4. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - Initially I did not like the cel-shaded graphics of this game or the fact that I beat it in one weekend, but now I realize the game has so much depth just like Majora's Mask did (both games suffer because the basic storyline does not require a lot of these interesting side quests that are available). I may never like the cel-shading, but this game does earn its place in the Zelda landscape as a good game.

3. Wario Ware - This game certainly did not seem like much of a hit when it first came out, with Mario Party holding the minigame crown for so long. The question was why would you buy a game of minigames when you could play minigames as part of a bigger board game in MP? The answer was that when the games are so well designed to make a party laugh and replay the game for hours on end, you have something that beats any Mario Party. Wario Ware was one of the best in the GCN era.

2. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - And now we get to my sleeper pick on the Gamecube. For those who have played this game, you will understand why it ranks so high on my list (and many others). If you did not pick up this game and many players did not, you missed one inventive and easy to get into game. The storyline is compelling, the game has some cheap thrills and scares a la Resident Evil, lots of fighting and spellcasting action, and the best addition to any adventure game in years, the sanity meter. You had to keep up your health and magic meters, but the sanity meter made you hallucinate and see things not there, which is very inventive. The game is also playable many times because there are three different pathways through the game based on different kinds of Magic. A real hit.

1. Metroid Prime - I really wanted to put Eternal Darkness here, but it goes against the grain to put an unknown in the top spot. Metroid Prime updated a series that had been dead since the SNES days (despite huge NES and SNES popularity) into 3D and first person shooting, but Metroid was still more than awesome. While many of the same aspects from the 1986 classic came back, doing it all in 3D environments with a new juicy storyline just made everything perfect. With the Mario and Zelda franchises bringing out mediocre games and the Starfox franchise being all but murdered by a terrible outing, it was nice to see one of the old classic Nintendo standby franchises take over the throne in such a nice fashion.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, and that will bring us to the Nintendo 64. The Top ten will be revealed then (the N64 suffered from poor games far more than any other system in Nintendo history, which is why the list is limited to 10, and also coincidentally why Sony got such a great market placement).