Comment on Gamecube is the most underrated console while it was in circulation.
aard@kyu.de 5 months agoAnd for the family friendly aspect nothing after the wii beat it.
The multiplayer games there are just better than something like the switch offers, and the controllers are a good size and weight for emulating whatever they are representing in games. Stuff like tennis with the tiny light switch controllers just feels wrong.
orclev@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The market forces of today are also vastly different from when the GameCube or even the Wii launched. When the GameCube launched videogames were still largely considered something for children, game consoles were the primary platform for gaming, and the PC gaming market although it had been around for a while was still very much a hobbyist demographic. For context the GameCube was released in 2001 while Steam wouldn’t even be available till 2003 and wouldn’t have any 3rd party games until 2005. Today in contrast I think it’s very much accepted that people of all ages play videogames and the gaming market is pretty evenly divided up between PC and console gaming. Nintendo is quite happy with the niche they’ve carved out for themselves with their systems being largely a platform for their own extensive first party catalog plus any other 3rd party games people care to play on them. We live in an age where cross platform releases are the norm now, so platform is largely a question of preference outside of exclusive releases.
Family friendly at the time meant that your kids could play it on the living room TV and there wouldn’t be anything your average uptight conservative suburban mom would start writing angry letters about. Recalling my point about Nintendo’s family friendly rep having been established during the era of the NES and SNES it’s important to note that the ESRB didn’t exist for the entirety of the life of the NES and only showed up late into the life of the SNES. During that timeframe Nintendo very much wanted parents and grandparents to be comfortable purchasing any NES or SNES game for their children no matter their age, and so were very strict about what kinds of content they would or wouldn’t allow. The fact they let Mortal Kombat onto the SNES at all was something of a miracle even if they did insist on the most pointless censorship ever.
What you’re referring to as family friendly I would say is more accurately described as social gaming or couch co-op. The physical aspect of multiplayer gaming on the Wii certainly added something unique to local multiplayer on the console, an experience wholly unlike a group of players sitting on a couch holding more traditional controllers.
aard@kyu.de 5 months ago
Pretty much everybody copied it afterwards - Microsoft has Kinect, Sony has some support to use their camera for that. Switch controls can be detached for that kind of play - but there never was the high amount of well done movement games available on any other platform afterwards, and never again the good haptics of the wii remote.
We have the wii and on of our switches hooked up to the TV - in that mode we pretty much exclusively use the wii. I recently downloaded pretty much all remaining sports and dance games to get some more variety. For the switch the cool stuff is the mario cart with physical carts, and the Labo.
Being able to use the wii controllers and the balance board on the switch would’ve been a great thing.