Our Favorite GameCube Games | Vol 3

Another Saturday, another blog about our favorite GameCube games. Let's dive right into them!

Custom Robo

Custom Robo isn't just a childhood favorite of mine - it's an all-time favorite of mine. While nostalgia does play a part in my love for it, it's simply a great game in its own right.

The story isn't anything mind-blowing or anything to write home about. The player character, Hero, is given a watch by his father who mysteriously disappears shortly after. Hero's father sends him a letter telling him to become a great Robo Commander, and so Hero sets off in order to do so. Hero joins a bounty hunter group called "Steel Hearts", and this is where the game pretty much begins. You'll do different jobs as a bounty hunter and battle bad people with your Custom Robo (a customizable robot) to advance the story.

After battling certain characters, you'll unlock one of the parts that they used. Parts come in one of the following categories and affect your robo in different ways:

• Body: Different types of bodies can affect your movement speed, jump, dash, and your armor.

• Gun: Your main weapon in battle. Guns come with different firing patterns, speeds, and projectile types.

• Bomb: These are mostly used for attacking overhead and keeping your opponent from staying in one spot the entire match.

• Pod: Used for attacking from behind cover or for keeping some distance between you and your opponent.

• Legs: These also affect your movement speed and jumps, but on a deeper level.

Combat consists of running around an arena (called the "holosseum" in-game) and blasting each other one of you runs out of HP. Before battle you'll be able to see what parts your opponent is using, allowing you to assess their playstyle and build your robo to counter that. Each type of part helps to balance combat and keep your opponent on their toes, keeping them from staying in one place the entire battle.

The soundtrack is a gigantic bop. Some of my favorite tracks are the world map theme, the battle preparation screen, and the track that plays in the cafe.

It's a shame that Nintendo has neglected this series for so long. This could be HUGE in today's multiplayer-centric market. Go read my original blog post about the series!

~ Aaron

Shadow the Hedgehog

The GameCube is one of those consoles that used to be underrated. Unless you were a child in the early 00s or a huge Nintendo stan, it’s likely that you missed it. The PS2, and Halo specifically on the Xbox, got all the attention back then. And hey, us kids didn’t know what we were missing. DMC, GTA, Halo, Silent Hill, and many, many more titles found on the more mature consoles were groundbreaking in their own way. 

On the other hand, the teenager who dismissed the GC as a lunchbox didn’t know what they were missing either. Some of the best games in Nintendo history came out during those halcyon days, and multi platform classics tended to look and play their best on the GC too.

Shadow the Hedgehog is not one of those games. Sonic himself always felt a little dated compared to Mario. Mario was a timeless classic that could’ve been introduced in any decade. Sonic was that hair metal transitioning into Nu Metal 90s cool guy. He had a carefree attitude and the indifference that would characterize Gen X in the US.

Unfortunately for Sonic, his gameplay didn’t transition well into 3D either. The blue hedgehog would not return to the big stage until 1998 after 1993’s Sonic CD - an eternity in those days. There Sonic Adventure was released, and Sega would find a formula for Sonic games that lasted until 2005, to mixed results.

Sonic’s own gameplay worked well enough in the title, but it opened the roster up to several characters that had appeared in the Genesis and Saturn platformers. Their gameplay was more miss than hit. We don’t speak of Big the Cat. Sonic Adventure 2 kept the more popular secondary playstyles of run and gun from E-102 and hunting for shards from Knuckles. 

SA2 also gave the world Shadow, who represented what Sonic looks like if you mix him with Hayden Christiansen’s dialogue in Star Wars and add the right amount of 12 year old power fantasy. He was the Vegeta to Sonic’s Goku, and I have no doubt this sounded good to a Sega boardroom doing as much cocaine as possible to outrun their impending bankruptcy.

After going third party, Shadow returned in 2003’s Sonic Heroes which is a pretty solid game,, but you could tell the gameplay loop debuted in Sonic Adventure was starting to go stale. Sega needed to shake things up if they wanted to see continued success for the franchise. So what did they do?

If your guess was “give Shadow poorly-aimed submachine guns and have him say "damn and hell”, you were correct. That’s right, this Sonic spinoff has GUNS. The concept is that Shadow can take multiple paths through each level: good, evil, and neutral. This leads to different endings and adds to replayability. 

The gameplay itself is solid enough, but a few of the levels are pretty janky. In particular, any level where you have to go to a space station needed more time in the oven. The plot on the other hand…is…wow. Shadow is maybe an android? Maybe he killed an innocent child? Maybe he was created by aliens? Maybe he’s a good guy? The commander of GUN hates him for reasons that are unclear. “This is who I am!” Shadow says for the 6th time, and I’m still not sure what’s going on.

Part of the problem is the plot has to continue threads from SA2 and SH. SA was mostly a standalone game, but technically all four share an extended universe, and it had become a mess. Additionally, the guns really add nothing to the game. Aiming is impossible. This is the first game where you can shoot people in a Sonic game, so there’s that. Shadow also gets two new moves: Chaos Control, which lets him speed through a level and isn’t actually very helpful because going fast is not conducive to completing a lot of the mission objectives, and Chaos Blast which does a small AOE attack.

The cherry on top of this very mixed game is the English translation, which was clearly slapped together by third semester Japanese language students. Shadow utters classic lines such as: “this is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me.” And “disgusting black creatures get out of my sight” which was ill-conceived at best. 

Ultimately, Shadow the Hedgehog would be a pretty forgettable, middling platformer were it not for the Sonic branding and the hilariously bad English translation. It’s worth a play through if you want to see what every 12 year old in 2005 thought was their first “adult game”. But otherwise in the parlance of Bill from the 3DO experience, it’s not a “must play.”

Hopefully Shadow found that DAMN fourth chaos emerald. 

~ Will

Killer7

Originally a part of the “Capcom 5”, a series of games developed exclusively for the Nintendo Gamecube, Killer is definitely one of the strangest games in the GameCube library. The story follows Harman Smith and his crew of 7 Assassins that are tasked with taking down the terrorist group known as Heaven Smile. Each of the assassins has their own unique abilities that will need to be used to get through the game; from Coyote Smith’s lock-picking skills, KADAE Smith using her own blood to reveal hidden paths, or Garcian Smith recovering the head of a fallen comrade to revive them. Then there are the NPCs you encounter, like the gimp suit man that speaks in cryptic messages, the disembodied head of an angsty teenage girl, and the ill-tempered maid with a split personality.

If you couldn’t already tell, the game is absolutely wild. One minute you’re shooting down enemies that let out a heinous laugh as they explode into a fountain of blood, then the next you’re in a shootout with an anime Japanese school girl armed with a machine gun. It is all brought to life with the use of a unique cel shading art style that really adds an exclamation point to the entire package. There is a heavy use of bright colors and dark tones that when mixed together really amplifies the hyperrealism and ultraviolence.

The gameplay takes a rather unorthodox approach with character movements being set on rails, with points of interest popping-up indicating the different pathways, items, NPCs, etc the player can interact with. The combat switches to a stationary first-person view, where you are able to freely aim and shoot at things in the surrounding area. It’s as awkward as it sounds and definitely takes some getting used to, but it works fine enough for the most part. While the first-person shooting segments are a big part of the game, it would be misleading to describe Killer7 as an action game, I would describe it more of an adventure game with action elements.

There is a puzzle element to killing enemies and bosses. Some have a specific target you shoot to quickly disperse them, while others later in the game require a specific ability of one of the 7 assassins to defeat. For example, there is one boss encounter where a fast moving boss can only be hurt while in the light, with the best solution being timing Maske de Smith’s grenade shot when the boss is running into the lit area.

Killer7 is the very first taste of Gouchi Suda (Suda51) outside of Japan for many and he would continue to indulge in the delightfully bizarre and crazy with the "No More Heroes" series, as well as having a hand in "Lollipop Chainsaw" and "Shadow of the Damned". While those other games are all great in their own way, none of them really come close to being as unhinged as Killer 7. The game is far from perfect, but its wicked sense of humor, oddly beautiful art style and completely off the wall storyline really strikes that certain part of my brain that just loves this kind of crazy shit. Killer7 isn’t for everybody, but there definitely is nothing else quite like it on the GameCube.

~ Tony

That's a wrap! Check-in next Saturday for the next volume of our favorite GameCube games.