GC was a true disappointment for me.
Bought it day 1.
Luigi’s Mansion never felt much more than an appetizer to me. I still find it supremely boring to this day. Today it’d be an indie game.
Rogue Leader was spectacular... and frustrating as hell, with performance hiccups that a game would be roasted for these days.
Launch software for both GC and GBA was such a far cry from Super Mario 64. That gen didn’t exactly start with fireworks for Nintendo.
Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker were a one-two punch of disappointment I’ve never felt ever since. They were expected to be the GC’s crown jewels. They turned out to be the most rushed, unpolished, unappealing episodes in their respective series. I swear the GC was basically dead to me after The Wind Waker. Only later that year, Metroid Prime (which I got some time after launch) saved the console for me and justified my purchase. Later on, RE4 and Ikaruga became my other main reasons to own a GC. And yeah, I played a lot of Soul Calibur 2. Too bad the GC’s controller wasn’t exactly fit for fighting games.
Oh, and Smash Bros. Melee. My first Smash game. Raving reviews. Those close-ups of Mario’s denim on magazines, you could almost feel the texture with your fingers.
I hated that game with such passion, the very idea there’s still an insane number of nerds playing it over the newest iterations makes my fists itch.
And then there were the accessories. The GB Player... that output at 50Hz only in Europe, and if you wanted a purple one you had to get it from Japan anyway because the west would get the purple system (a spectacular marketing misstep, even if I loved it over the boring black model) but not a purple add-on. Apparently that’d somehow emasculate your console beyond some unspoken threshold and bullies would come to your house to beat you up or something. And of course the Japanese model needed a boot disc to work. And this was before region-free consoles, so a Freeloader was needed to play imports. Two versions of it, because the first one didn’t work with some games made after it and you needed to buy the revision.
Then there was the GBA-GC link cable. And the 251-block memory card, because the 59-block one was basically useless, and what the fuck are those numbers anyway? Nintendo milking users for all they were worth. And people say that Nintendo fans would buy anything Nintendo makes, today. Lol.
GC was a good console that came out at the worst possible time. Not even Nintendo was ready to make the best out of it. The marketing was all wrong. The controller was trying so hard to be different at a time when controllers were striving towards a standard. It wanted to be a games-only system when consoles were pushing hard to be all-in-one multimedia systems. And there was simply nothing Nintendo could do to shake off their “kiddy” image against PS and XBox, especially since Pokémon was taking the world by storm and even with the most mature-looking games available, Nintendo would still be the Pokémon guys. While Nintendo fans were waiting for a cel-shaded Zelda and Mario’s tropical adventure, PS2 users were having the time of their lives with the industry-changing titles of that famed “Fall of 2001” picture. It was over long before launch for the GC, the poor purple box didn’t stand a chance.