gamecubes drop the beat when appropriate

by rob

shifty logo
A couple of weeks before exams were finished, I treated myself to a little trip home from Sackville to eat food and sleep (I said I’d study too).

I stopped by silverorange to visit old war buddies, and Isaac showed me his marvelous new contraption; he showed me his GameCube1.

It was smooth and amazingly great. I also hear it’s the least expensive of the competing game consoles. I played with one all weekend and I have determined my favorite feature.

Back in time, during my wide-eyed game programming days, I was destined to wrangle DirectX with Visual Basic and kick the QBasic habit (I wasn’t familiar with OOP back then, someday I’ll come back). Anyway, one feature I was rather excited about was DirectMusic. It would give realtime control over the block-rocking MIDI tracks to breathe life into the format. Nice ‘rasterized’ soundtracks were doing just fine, so it never really caught on. But, I really liked the idea. I think Half-Life attempted active music too, but didn’t realize it as well as SSX Tricky or Luigi’s Mansion did. They managed to have active on-the-fly mixed music in their own creative ways.

In SSX Tricky, (a physics-free snowboarding game), the beat would kick along and each slope would get its own tune. But when your magic tricky-meter would max out (allowing you to do insanely impossible and entertaining tricks) they would mix on some guy rapping “(rap-rapity?rap-rap-rap) It’s tricky! It’s tricky!”. And if you caught giant air off big jumps, the music strips right down to the beat. For a “I am holding my breath” type feel that can’t be beaten.

In Luigi’s Mansion, poor, frightened Luigi hums along to the music. Sometimes he whistles, sometimes he makes nervous noises to the tune. Depending on what room of the mansion you are in, different instruments play along, and they smoothly cut in new ones as you step from room to room. There is also a puzzle involving getting a bunch of stray instruments (a 3-headed saxophone being among them) to play themselves, to make an amusing arrangement of the classic Mario theme. Good stuff.

So my verdict is, buy GameCube, it’s great. I haven’t tried the other systems, so I’ll assume they’re horrible. I have never been so impressed by the audio in any game. EAX was cute, it fleshed out games and if you run a guitar through the filters you can have hours of fun. We’ve had voice snippets since SNES, since then it has all sounded the same to me. The threshold which seems to have been static CD tracks has been shattered! Long live active music2!

  1. I am unsure about how to capitalize ‘gamecube’, on Nintendo’s site, they always used SMALLCAPS leaving me confused).
  2. Is it still called that? Was it ever called that?
 

11 thoughts on “gamecubes drop the beat when appropriate”

  2. Gamecube, xbox or PS2? Seriously.

    I plan on buying a gaming system in January (first since my NES) and I have yet to play any of the three systems. I’m probably going to rent all three systems before my purchase, but until then, this is how it breaks down for me:

      xbox
      I’ve had nothing but problems with my microsoft keyboard, so I’ve never been to confident in their microsoft’s hardware. Why should I buy their gaming system? This article doesn’t help, and neither does this screenshot. It may be the bleeding-edge but I think I’ll pass.

      Gamecube
      Nintendo always focused on gaming more than graphics, which is exactly what I want. Usually I’d feel safe going with Nintendo, but I’m unsure about the new mini-CD format.

      They use the smaller CD’s (2.5 inches I think), which are next to impossible to burn. They may cut down on pirating games, but I’m just not going to buy the system in the first place if I can’t steal anything for it. Granted, I can’t burn PS2 or Xbox games yet, but they’re more likely to be cracked before Nintendo’s.

      Nintendo hasn’t any history with this format of game. Is the jump from cartridges to CD’s going to work? It’s only been out for a month.

      Unlike the other two systems, I can’t play DVD’s. I’d probably never use it to play my DVD’s anyways, but I want the most bang for my buck. They trust Japan with the DVD format, why not us? Fuckers.

      PS2
      – The system has had a year to build up a healthy roster of games
      – I can play my old PS2 games on it (if I had any)
      – DVD and CD playback

      It may be only a year old, but it seems to be the most versatile and proven system out there.

    So the only problem is that I haven’t played any of the systems yet. Can I get some advice? Opinions? Rude comments?

    Anyone?

  3. I have rented a gamecube twice now, the first time on purpose, the second time because all the Xbox’s were gone. For the second rental I actually went to WalMart and bought a memory card for the gamecube because there are very few games made anymore of a genre that you can really enjoy without a memory card. This is why I am leaning in favor of the Xbox. I enjoyed the gamecube both times, its a remarkable machine in a small package. But with component prices so low I find it to be a simple cash grab to tell me that I need to pay an extra $30-$50 to be able to save my games on my new $300-$500 system. XBox put an 8GB hard drive in. I’m sure that memory card for the gamecube is no more than 8MB! Could Nintendo not have put at least 64MB of fairly non-volatile battery backed up memory in the box? What would that have cost them, $10 or maybe $12 per system when they buy it in bulk? Consider as well that one of the games I rented was John Madden Football 2002 which informed me that to use the Franchise feature (build a team from the ground up) it would need one entire 59 block memory card for itself. That means that the game technically costs $30 more on the Gamecube than it would on the Xbox because you have to buy a dedicated memory card to use the same features. All of this plus the lack of DVD means that the gamecube will only be a rental machine for me, where as I might buy an xbox.

  4. two handles on this one!Vince, read this:

    In Japan, there is a Panasonic GameCube and it is a DVD player / Gamecube hybrid. The only snag is it doesn’t play the local DVDs for North-America yet.

  7. As a proud owner of a gamecube i think its the best purchase. Granted, it has no harddrives, but one memory card has enough space for many games (I have four games, and well under half my memory card is actually used.)

    As well, the cheaper price allowed me to get more games on my budget, and i can’t complain about one of them – they are all a blast.

    I guess the real reason i went with nintendo though, is that I was one of those kids who never had an NES and always wanted one.

    The downfall of it is, as vince said, the media will be impossible to copy for quite a while. I wouldn’t worry about the system’s horsepower though – it might not be as brute as the xbox – but its a very powerful system.

    So, as a biased gamecube owner, i say get it – mainly for the games (Mario Sunshine, the new Zelda are coming out next year), and right now there are some greats like Super Monkey Ball, and Super Smash Brothers, and of course Luigi’s Mansion.

  10. If the gamecube played DVDs, I would buy one immeadiately. Instead I will save my pennies for a bit longer, and get a ps2.

    If the xbox were not the weight and price of compact car and played DVDs, I would think about buying one. Seriously, have you seen the controllers? They’re the size of small hams.

    What I really want is a ps2 with gamecube controllers.

Comments are closed.