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November To Remember

by Rick Powers - May 21, 2001, 9:45 am EDT

Rick manages to crawl out of his post-E3 exhaustion just long enough to sum up some of his thoughts on the show ...

The hardest thing in the world is to come home to your aging, dusty N64 after having experienced the sheer gaming joy that is the Nintendo GameCube. Your hands naturally want to curl into the position to hold that contoured controller, your eyes find it hard to adjust to the lack of bright lights all around you, and you constantly strain to hear the sounds that are no longer there. Now that all of the excitement has died down, and the exhaustion is setting in, there is one fact that remains: November is going to be a very expensive month.

Everything that we’ve seen, heard, and experienced tells us that come November, Nintendo has nothing to worry about. Nintendo has created a machine that is very easy to develop for, easy to extract power from, easy to control, and if the rumors hold true come May 24th, easy to buy. The competition (if you can call it that) showed us a very different story than the one they are telling. Aside from the PS2’s leading franchises (Gran Turismo 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Tony Hawk 3, and Final Fantasy X), which admittedly looked and played fantastic, little else in the Sony booth held any interest whatsoever.

What about the new kid on the block, Microsoft? The Penny Arcade guys said it best: Eh. Microsoft has done a lot of talk about the developers they’ve secured, but when push came to shove, Microsoft delivered a console that isn’t finished, games that looked rushed and unready, and a controller that is simply too big and clunky compared to the simplicity of the GameCube input device.

Nintendo is in a class of its own, but us die-hard Nintendo fans already knew that. Sony and Microsoft are going to have an interesting battle for second place, but unless Microsoft makes some incredible headway in the next six months (not to mention getting finished hardware into developer’s hands), they’re going to be relegated to a distant last in this race.

Everyone at the show thought that Nintendo “won” the show in amazing fashion. They silenced all of the critics who thought that the SpaceWorld footage from last year was all pre-rendered FMV. We were able to PLAY those games on the show floor, and they were simply stunning. But the confusion is understandable, the games really did look pre-rendered, even as you were controlling the characters. Super Smash Bros. Melee is an outstanding achievement … you can pause the game and zoom in on the individual characters are see the detail in each. The texture of the fabric in Mario’s overalls, the rivets in his pockets, the seams in his pantlegs … and thousands of polygons all rendered on-the-fly with no slowdown. If there are bottlenecks in the system, we didn’t find them. And neither did the developers, apparently.

Not everything was perfect, but it was close. We were able to crash Luigi’s Mansion and WaveRace: Blue Storm on occasion, but these incidents were rare, and not unexpected in unfinished software. Some of the demos were frustratingly short, or had features not so cleverly hidden (like the blatant request for a secret code in StarFox Adventures), serving to enrage those of us thirsting for more. There was at least one more GameCube title to be found on the floor if you hunted for it: Madden 2002 was on display in the EA booth on GameCube hardware in the South Hall, looking early, but still incredible.

Every show ends up with some soft of scorecard on how the games met expectations, but in Nintendo’s booth, there really wasn’t a stinker to be found. Pikmin (Miyamoto-san’s secret “Cabbage” project) looks to be a sleeper hit in the US, as the game may be a little too “Japanese” for American tastes. StarFox Adventures still looks like the same “Dinosaur Planet” title we saw a while back with new textures, as was evidenced by the fact that the Fox model simply didn’t have the polish of some of the other titles. WaveRace looked fantastic, but the courses were just three and were all from the original game. NBA Courtside’s animations looked rough, Luigi’s Mansion looked short, and there was still no sign of Mario Kart for GameCube or a Zelda title on the floor.

These are all nit-picking flaws, though, things the layperson might not notice or even care about. The only true disappointment was despite appearing in Super Smash Bros. Melee, there wasn’t a “Mario” GameCube title on the floor. We’ve heard conflicting reasons and theories as to why, and Miyamoto-san himself claims that we’ll see both Zelda and Mario at SpaceWorld in a little over three months. The only question left to answer is whether or not the gamer’s constand demand to see Luigi in his own title is really what the gamer wanted, and if Luigi can fit the bill. Unlike the N64 launch, it appears that Nintendo has more than one system seller on its hands, as Luigi, WaveRace, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Star Wars: Rouge Leader, and Madden 2002 are all potential hardware movers.

Now, it is simply a matter of trying to keep our enthusiasm down until SpaceWorld, because aside from the annoucement of the price in three days, we’ve likely seen the last of the GameCube until August. You should all be thankful you DIDN’T get a chance to play any of those titles, or you might not be able to bear waiting. I know I can’t.

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