Board 8 > What's the most technically impressive Gamecube game? (Day 11) + GBA Final

(+) Yeah! (+)

Star Fox Adventures

Is it weird that my first thought is The Wind Waker? I know its probably demonstrably not

My early thought is Resident Evil 4 but Im open to being convinced otherwise. Twilight Princess is also in the mix.

Metroid Prime

Is the correct answer. The only other contender is Metroid Prime 2...and I may still change my vote.

My hot take here is that it's Pikmin 2

Third party devs repeatedly struggled to get 100+ moving objects on screen at once on the Wii. Pikmin 2 did it on the GCN while looking gorgeous and, as I recall, having basically no slow down. It also had large levels, the ability to swap between two playable characters in different parts of the world with no loading or lag, and a day/night cycle with dynamic lighting.

Tentatively seconding Pikmin 2 until someone provides more convincing arguments for anything else.

(Also Pikmin 2 had e-Reader connectivity in the JP version)

Jakyl25 posted...

Is it weird that my first thought is The Wind Waker? I know its probably demonstrably not

Wind Waker particle effects are phenomenal but yeah I'm not sure this is it. Metroid Prime is close but gonna go with Pikmin 2 also.

Metroid Prime still looks stunning.

REmake and RE4 also come to mind.

I wanna give a shout out to Luigi's Mansion as well. The particle effects and lighting in that game are something else. Probably not the winner here but very impressive for a launch game.

Starfox Adventures

Gonna vote Wind Waker

Like it's enough that the game still looks amazing to this day, with amazing effects, but there's some real neat things under the hood too. Most people think the game is entirely cel-shaded, but the really impressive thing is that it isn't. It uses different shaders for different objects to make the graphical style work, which is pretty amazing considering the Gamecube doesn't have programmable shaders.

Kenri posted...

I wanna give a shout out to Luigi's Mansion as well. The particle effects and lighting in that game are something else. Probably not the winner here but very impressive for a launch game.

The fun thing about LM is that everything in the game was specifically designed to show off the console's new features.

Twilight Princess

I admit this is a fanboy pick

Resident Evil 4

I'll go with RE4, while admitting that the argument presented for Pikmin 2 is compelling.

Don't forget about the randomly generated level layouts and music as well.

Bump

Metroid Prime

Metroid Prime was like Outkast's song Bombs Over Baghdad: it immediately felt like it came from the future, and it felt like that for years.

I gotta go with REmake.

I feel like the votes for Resident Evil games is more about the fact that they made PS2 games look weak (which it was, relatively) rather than pushing the GC hardware.

the fact that gamecube was competitive in any multiplat releases given the smaller disc sizes is something worth considering to be fair, yeah

actually in light of that, i was thinking about going re4 but considering it doesn't even have that argument to really flex given they put it on two discs, i've changed my mind

instead i'm going to go with a very off the wall pick and go with the longest game i can think of on the system that doesn't use two discs, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom

UF8 posted...

the fact that gamecube was competitive in any multiplat releases given the smaller disc sizes is something worth considering to be fair, yeah

I know this is a different time, but the vast amount of data storage that is expected as the norm now gives devs a reason to just not care. There are games that are 5, possibly 10 times as big as they could be if anyone cared about not eating up storage space.

Going back to the N64, it had Resident Evil 2, and they did so mostly through creative uses of data compression. Two PlayStation CDs worth of game on an N64 cart. A Gamecube disc was closer to a DVD in storage than an N64 cart was to two PSX discs by a wide margin.

Edit: Also, RE4 is legit better on GC than PS2, disc space be damned.

ChichiriMuyo posted...

I know this is a different time, but the vast amount of data storage that is expected as the norm now gives devs a reason to just not care. There are games that are 5, possibly 10 times as big as they could be if anyone cared about not eating up storage space.

Going back to the N64, it had Resident Evil 2, and they did so mostly through creative uses of data compression. Two PlayStation CDs worth of game on an N64 cart. A Gamecube disc was closer to a DVD in storage than an N64 cart was to two PSX discs by a wide margin.

this is true, but it is also true that gamecube discs still only had a third the capacity of ps2/xbox, so managing to keep up with them specifically as often as they did was still notable at times

for wii and wii u i've already got some pretty impressive games that kept their filesizes mindbogglingly low in mind, and i've decided to try my best at keeping consistent with that (regardless of reception in this case) here. (admittedly this wasn't that straightforward, given what had to use multiple discs, and also how many of the other longer games happened to be ports from dc or even n64, thus making their feats a little less impressive)

Edit: RE4 is is legit better on GC than PS2

Pikmin 2 was out there doing things that not just the GC but other systems couldn't do, according to some.

This is really difficult....

I think ultimately I have to go with Resident Evil 1 Remake, but RE0, RE4, Metroid Prime, and F-Zero GX (notable for impressing even Nintendo, if Nagoshi is to be believed) are all in the running too. That system had a lot of impressive games.

I'm not sure that I understand the argument for REmake1. It looked good and was a great game for fans. What else am I missing there?

Don't read too far into it. I was just naming the first big technically impressive game I could think of.

I mean its 4 over Remake surely as Remake was using pre-rendered backgrounds pretty extensively, which is part of how it could get so much out of the Gamecube to begin with. It was a cool trick, but 4 is pushing the hardware more.

Pikmin 2

Resident Evil 4