Ambitious GameCube Games Everyone Ignored

While arguably boasting the best first-party hit rate of any of their consoles, the GameCube was Nintendo’s last real attempt at keeping up with fidelity over ingenuity. We love it dearly. Everyone knows its ambitious titles like Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, and Eternal Darkness, but there are a few games that shot for the stars on Nintendo’s little purple box that didn’t quite survive the fittest. Cube. Just roll the first game.

 

Cubivore: Survival Of The Fittest

Do you think Intelligent Systems pitched the game Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest to Nintendo because Nintendo made the GameCube? A cube game for a cube console? The answer is absolutely no, considering the game was originally developed for the Nintendo 64DD. But it could be fun to start a conspiracy, if you guys are up for that? Fun little conspiracy?

Originally launched as Animal Leader in Japan and published by Nintendo, weak reviews meant Nintendo were gunshy about localising the game for the West, until ATLUS USA agreed to publish the game instead.

What makes Cubivore one of the most weird yet ambitious games on the GameCube is the fact that it simulates a full-blown animal kingdom, complete with family tree genetics that need to be managed in order to succeed. The goal of the game is to take down the Killer Cubivore, who’s rampaging around the game’s open world, but in order to do that, you need to obtain additional limbs and mutations. They’re only gained from killing and eating Cubivores, and then mating with a female Cubivore to pass your genes down to the next generation. Each generation gives you a new limb, allowing you to take on stronger monsters, until finally you can take on the Killer himself.

It’s a bit janky and the graphics certainly aren’t pushing the limits of the console, but the idea alone is creative, unusual and ambitious, especially coming out six years before something like Spore. Give up the ghost on owning this one physically though.

 

Geist

On the surface, Geist seems like a weird game for Nintendo to publish. An M-rated first person shooter with supernatural horror elements seems like it’s far-removed from Nintendo’s typical wheelhouse. It was only the second M-rated game published by Nintendo on the GameCube, after Eternal Darkness a few years earlier. That should give you a sense of how ambitious n-Space were in the first place pitching the game to Nintendo.

Given the game received a bit of a mediocre response from critics, maybe n-Space wasn’t quite ready for Nintendo to say yes to that pitch. n-Space had lofty ambitions for Geist’s gameplay, and 2005 might have just been too soon for the guys whose last game set an impossibly high benchmark.

Playing as John Raimi, a science experiment has left your soul separated from your body, a bunch of interdimensional monsters are running around this research facility, and there’s a guy called Volks who wants to brainwash Raimi’s body. Being a disembodied soul has its privileges though, as Raimi can possess other humans, demons, and animals to defeat enemies or solve puzzles. It’s kinda like Prey meets FEAR, kinda a little slightly.

Geist is a bit of a clunky game that really couldn’t bring it all together in one smooth package that befit the hype, but there’s imagination and ambition here that makes it worth a revisit, if only out of curiosity. Just make sure you bring a guide, or you might end up lost.

 

Lost Kingdoms & Lost Kingdoms 2

Anyone who’s stuck around the channel for long enough will no doubt be aware that we consider FromSoftware to be among the most ambitious developers ever. To go from a financial software development company in the 80s and 90s, only to pivot into becoming a full-blown game development studio is the kind of ambition we could only hope for. After that, FromSoft could’ve easily phoned it in and made some of what the kids call “slop”, but even their game library is filled with ambitious games that try to do something new in a growing medium.

King’s Field and Shadow Tower both pioneered a new kind of RPG, something that would go on to inform their seminal Souls games, while Armored Core became the premier series for mech lovers. [pause] Nobody’s perfect.

An ambitious series that tends to get overshadowed by comparison though is Lost Kingdoms for the GameCube, as both games showcased a different kind of RPG action combat than players were used to.

Instead of doing all the fighting yourself, players used cards that represented various creatures and elements, using them to attack other monsters. Elements had their own strengths and weaknesses, and players could even capture monsters to turn them into cards or evolve their own cards to obtain stronger effects. In a way, FromSoftware nailed the formula that more modern Pokemon games like Legends Arceus adopted, using your monsters to attack other monsters in real time.

While the first and second game received middling to decent reviews, there’s no denying the ambition FromSoftware had in delivering something wholly unique to GameCube lovers, but very few actually played them, particularly that second game. Modern port, when? Let’s have a ball.

 

Odama

Odama is about what you’d expect from Yoot Saito, the creator of Seaman. The guy loved his microphone peripherals more than I love a forced F-Zero mention.

The penultimate published by Nintendo for the GameCube, with the final honour going to that indie hit Twilight Princess, Odama is a baffling mix of pinball and real-time strategy that you’d only see these days from an indie studio unafraid to take some actual risks. Nintendo publishing a game like Odama in today’s day and age? Maybe as something you’d find on the eShop but not as a full-priced retail release, especially as something that requires its own microphone peripheral to be played properly.

Set in an alternative take on Feudal Japan, you control a commander as he attempts to avenge his father’s death using the most ridiculous weapon ever made, the Odama. Instead of relying on a massive cannon, some kind of bomb or a new type of automatic rifle, Kagetora takes to the battlefield with a massive ball and two pinball-like flippers, using the combination of the three and his ranks of footsoldiers to try and break down the enemy’s defenses.

What about the mic? That can be used to send orders to the men to move in certain ways, meaning you’re spending the majority of your time playing Odama frantically screaming orders while your soldiers are helplessly getting flattened. It’s mad and ambitious, but considering people liked to shout at balls on TV they can’t control more than those they could, and also that the GameCube was in its dying days, it sold very poorly. Mechs me pretty sad, that.

 

Custom Robo

If we were to have a pound or freedom buck for every single game on the GameCube that involved toys fighting each other, we’d have, by our count, five quid/dollars.That isn’t a lot but is indicative of a weird niche at least.

That includes Gotcha Force, Medabots Infinity, two Army Men games and Custom Robo. If people can think of any we’ve missed, perhaps they’d get a free Steam key?

Anyway, Custom Robo had been a series for a few years before the GameCube launch, releasing exclusively in Asia across the N64 and Game Boy Advance starting in 1999. Come 2004, and Nintendo finally made the decision to port Custom Robo: Battle Revolution to the West as just Custom Robo. And by the West, we mean just America. At least Europe got the DS game, coincidentally the last one in the series.

Controlling a young hero, you receive a letter stating your missing father has actually passed away, so in accordance with his wishes, you set out to become a Robo Commander. That sounds like you’d be piloting huge mechs, but in reality, you’re kids on the playground smashing your toys together, until otherworldly and apocalyptic shenanigans occur, as they tend to. The main portion of the game concerns fights in a Holosseum, but what makes Custom Robo ambitious is that players can customise different parts of their robo with new chassis, weapons, mobility and more. In comparison to Custom Robo’s contemporaries, specifically Gotcha Force, which just made you pick a team of pre-made toys, Custom Robo feels a lot more involved. Not the greatest game ever made, but still a shame it never landed here.

 

Homeland

Before any of you ask, no, this isn’t a super late tie-in game to the political thriller series starring Claire Danes and Damien Lewis that somehow ran for eight seasons? I thought that concept had like two seasons, max.

Homeland for the GameCube fits our legal mandate of one Japan-only release per video. That’s not an actual mandate, but they do tend to make for more interesting talking points, and Homeland certainly is more interesting than most. In a lot of ways, it feels like Homeland is a game that launched years too early, as it was one of only four GameCube games that were actually designed around the use of online play, one of the console’s most underutilised capabilities. Worse still, it’s the only one out of the four that isn’t called Phantasy Star Online, and didn’t release outside of Japan.

As for what kind of game Homeland is, it’s best described as an online co-op RPG, though with the amount of players you can have in one session, some would argue it should be called an MMO. Using LAN or the internet, one player can become a “gamemaster” and host a session for up to 35 other players to join, with Homeland using peer-to-peer matchmaking instead of relying on a central server. Players join up and complete adventures together, earning EXP and levelling up, but perhaps the most unique mechanic within Homeland is the fact that players could hold hands to form a chain, with the lead player in the chain receiving all the cumulative stats of everyone within the chain.

It’s like if Hands Across America had a more violent end goal, so we’re gutted it never left its native island.

 

Amazing Island

Another GameCube game that Europe missed out on for seemingly no reason, Amazing Island is a game that, as far as we’re concerned, defies traditional genre convention. You could say it’s an action adventure game, which is typically the default genre pigeonhole for a game that’s hard to define. In reality, Amazing Island runs the gamut of minigame collection, RPG, monster creation and rearing and even multiplayer to create something a bit different and absolutely ambitious. It doesn’t mean that the attempts by Hitmaker and Ancient were appreciated at the time by critics, as the game earned a less than mediocre rating on Metacritic, but regardless, Amazing Island feels unlike anything else on the GameCube.

After creating their own avatar, players are given a monster partner and told they need to defeat a possessing spirit known as the Black Evil. In order to defeat said evil, you need to complete courses, basically collections of minigames, which will give you Vision Orbs that can be used to purify the island and earn new items and abilities to customise your monster. What makes Amazing Island more ambitious is that it’s not just pre-made monsters to choose from, as players can practically create a monster from scratch after selecting a frame that the monster has to adhere to.

If that’s not silly enough for you, you can even generate a monster by completing a small personality quiz, which is just a cute extra touch.

 

Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey

Calling a licensed game ambitious just by virtue of its license might sound a bit strange. But in the case of Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey, ambition is definitely worth mentioning.

You might be wondering what the hell Dinotopia is, and that’s why licensing it was pretty ambitious, if not perhaps a bit daft.

For the uninitiated, Dinotopia is actually a series of books that were released in the 90s and had been adapted into films and TV shows, but the game itself is based pretty much exclusively on the book rather than anything else. Books into video game adaptations aren’t as seamless a transition as film into video games, but sometimes they work, like The Witcher. Dinotopia though? Not quite The Witcher.

Another action adventure game featuring monsters, just without the creation or minigames this time around, Dinotopia follows brothers Drake and Jacob Gemini, who’ve been stranded on Dinotopia for 10 years with their dad. Just after the game begins, their dad gets devoured by a rogue T-Rex, with Jacob joining an anti-dinosaur group called The Outsiders (no relation), while Drake becomes the new guardian of Dinotopia. Throughout 24 levels, you’ll deal with dinosaurs and humans via weapon-based combat, and solve a few puzzles while you’re at it, but you want to hear the most ambitious part of this one?

Clearly devs Vicious Cycle Software, along with publishers TDK Mediactive and Global Star Software thought this game would be enough of a success on its own that they only released it on GameCube and Xbox. No PS2 release? Giant mistake.

 

Doshin The Giant

Re-releasing an already made game for a new platform isn’t typically considered ambitious. Half of the Switch’s library that was initially sent out to die on Wii U wouldn’t be seen as that ambitious, for instance. But this here feels like quite the special case.

An  IP that originally launched on the 64DD that was actually a god simulation game, something that would be considered a niche product from a console that broke actual sales records, never mind a console considered a bit of a flop? Nintendo absolutely took a big risk publishing Doshin The Giant outside of Japan, and while it’s become a cult hit, it’s definitely not up there among the most successful GameCube games.

Released at a time when God games like Black & White had become all the rage, Doshin The Giant followed the titular lanky streak of Cheestring as he tried to make the wishes of the villagers come true. You do this by picking up trees and people, trying to spread love between the four different coloured tribes that you can find on the island. Because this is a god game though, you also have the option to be a bit of a bastard, transforming into Jashin, the Hate Giant, and stomping all over the villagers and their dreams. You gotta channel that rage somewhere. What is this genre of video game called? Therapy?

Whether playing as Doshin or Jashin, the villagers will release love or hate that’s then used to progress through the game. It’s a pretty simplistic game, but was also a great endorsement from Nintendo about how varied gaming could possibly be.

 

Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs New Generation

Let’s finish things off by mentioning a company who probably had the most ambition possible when it came to making wrestling games: AKI Corporation.

After revolutionising an entire genre with WWF No Mercy, while also making plans to conquer the world of hip-hop and wrestling with the first two Def Jam games, AKI Corp decided they were going to take on anime too. Enter Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs New Generation. No relation.

This was based on the Ultimate Muscle/Kinnikuman manga and anime, which brought together characters from all the different eras of the series to have a big rumble. Lots of characters, story modes for each, and moves and special attacks that reference specific moments made it a faithful game to the source material.

But what makes it ambitious? AKI could have rested on their laurels and simply used the regular version of their proprietary engine and plastered a cel-shaded skin over the top of it, but AKI updated the engine to incorporate the more aerial aspects of the franchise. Lots of jumping off the ropes and hitting divekicks, basically, leading to more dynamic attacks, juggle combos and more that obviously wouldn’t be seen in your more traditional fighting game. Hell, as mad as Def Jam is, they didn’t have Ghostface Killah hitting juggles on Snoop Dogg like a prime Eddy Gordo.

If nothing else, the ambition of Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs New Generation felt like a precursor to a game like WWE All-Stars, an over-the-top celebration of wrestling, and if we can get another All-Stars like wrestling game soon, we’d be very happy.

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