Nintendo's Gamecube has hit Australian shores with a low-cost thump. Don't lay down your dollars until you read our comprehensive review.
Good things in almost cubelike packages
Nintendo's Gamecube is currently the cheapest new console you can buy. If you were looking at a pure value by size arrangement, however, the Gamecube would come across very poorly against the Playstation 2 and especially the XBox. It's the smallest console (aside from portables) we've ever seen. Measuring 11cm x 15cm x 16cm, however, somebody has obviously forgotten to tell Nintendo something very basic about the nature of cubes. We do rather like the handy carrying handle on one side, but were surprised it didn't come with a warning not to carry it in that fashion while the console is on. Nintendo currently sell the Gamecube in either Indigo (purple to non-marketing folk) or Jet (black), although Nintendo's past history would tend to suggest we'll see Gamecubes in a variety of shades before very long.
Keeping with the small form factor, the Gamecube takes custom 1.5GB 7.62cm discs rather than standard CD/DVD discs. This should reduce piracy (who has a 7.62cm CD burner?) to an extent, although we're unsure about whether the smaller discs are likely to be more or less robust than their larger cousins.
Under the hood lies a 0.18 micron 485MHZ custom IBM Power PC chip, a custom ATI graphics chip and keeping with non-standard parts, a custom Macronix sound chip. Nintendo, like every other console manufacturer, is keen to talk up the potential capabilities of its system; it claims capabilities of 6-12 million actual rendered polygons per second . This is well below both the claimed specifications of the PS2 and XBox, but then their claimed figures generally revolve around maximum rates of unshaded, untextured polygons; you're more likely to see the 6-12 million rendered polygons than those that don't exist except as calculations.
The one factor we did notice with the Gamecube is that it has pleasantly fast loading times. It's not perhaps as fast as some of the most optimised XBox games that rely on hard drive caching, but it's certainly a step ahead of the PS2.
Boot up the Gamecube sans disk, and you'll be greeted with a very basic menu of options for memory card management and game loading. The display style is quite sparse, and doesn't visually compare well to the slick PS2 and XBox interfaces.
Gamers from PAL territories often get the short end of the stick when it comes to consoles, with 50Hz PAL translations of 60Hz NTSC games running slowly and with obvious borders. Nintendo's left the choice of display modes up to individual programming houses and the consumer; keeping the B button depressed as a game loads will bring up a menu option for 50 or 60Hz gameplay -- if your TV and the game supports it. It's exceptionally useful if you do have a screen capable of displaying at 60Hz, as the game may appear to refresh faster with this setting on.
Control freak
Nintendo experimented with an unconventional controller design with the Nintendo 64, and the Gamecube follows similar non-standard roots. While it boasts the virtually standard combination analogue and digital controls, the button layout of the Gamecube controller is unlike any other design we've seen. Nintendo's gone against the grain and abandoned the familiar diamond-pattern button arrangement for the frequent use interface buttons, instead going with four face buttons of different sizes (A,B,X,Y) splayed across the right hand side of the controller. These are supplemented with two analogue shoulder buttons (L,R) and a single right hand side button labelled as Z. The layout is very odd, and will take some time to get used to. It's not uncomfortable for extended play, although we did find that we tended to forget about the existence of the Z button, as it sits rather alone on the controller. We suspect, however, that the button layout will make Street Fighter-style games something of a chore to play, as gamers are accustomed to 2x3 button layouts for these games. Gamecube controllers support rumble features, and we were expecting their light weight to mean that rumbling would be more akin to purring. That certainly isn't the case; while the Gamecube controller isn't quite as capable in this area as the XBox controller, it's still no slouch when it comes to random vibrating motions.
The only other official peripheral at the moment is a 59 'block' memory card that looks suspiciously like a repainted PSOne memory card. Currently released games use between 4-15 blocks per save slot, so it should be a while before you need to get into serious memory management.
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