The GameCube Archives

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles U.S. Release Date: February 9, 2004 The GameCube Archives Score: 6.0/10 In what I find ironic, I never finished a Final Fantasy game before I beat Crystal Chronicles a few days ago for this review. I say this as someone who has been around for...quite awhile. I'll never forget playing the first Final Fantasy for NES at a friend's house--my first RPG experience--and being completely baffled. I picked up Final Fantasy VI in a mass SNES purchase, played through the first hour, thought it was cool, and never went back to it. For reference, Chrono Trigger is my favorite video game of all time. FFVI should have immediately hooked me. Pictured: the opening menu for not Chrono Trigger. But that's not all. PS1 era? I made it eight hours into FF9 , then never went back. I played FF8 for 12 hours and then stopped! At some...

Mario Kart Double Dash!! U.S. Release Date: November 17, 2003 The GameCube Archives Score: 6.5/10 Mario Kart is one of the most popular video game franchises in history. Every entry released for a Nintendo console has been a top-five best seller for that respective console. Several have been number one. However, there's a black sheep of the bunch. While Mario Kart: Double Dash is the second best selling GameCube game of all time, it's sold less copies than any other Mario Kart entry...even Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U. On top of that, this 2003 offering seems to have the lowest reputation. Back in the GameCube era, I bought essentially every marquee game for the system but Double Dash . I did play the game once, at my friend Robker's house, but I found that I hated it, disliking the mechanics and tracks.  Double exclamation points be damned! However, in recent years, es...

Resident Evil U.S. Release Date: April 30, 2002 The GameCube Archives Score: 9.5/10 For the entirety of the Playstation/Nintendo 64 run, I had to hear about how awesome Resident Evil games were. As a Nintendo fanboy, I wanted to pretend I was too cool for Resident Evil games, but they just seemed so awesome, I'd let my Playstation-owning friends regale me of their glory for hours. When the Sony/Nintendo battle shifted to PS2/GameCube, suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. Capcom announced three Resident Evil Game's that would, at the time of their release at least, be GameCube exclusives: 2002's Resident Evil Zero , 2005's Resident Evil 4 , and a 2002 remake of the original 1996 Playstation release that started it all, Resident Evil . Director, Shinji Mikami, felt that this first Resident Evil game did not graphically hold up to subsequent Resident Evil releases, but that the powerful Nintendo GameCube could remedy the situation. However, this remake would not j...