For as long as there have been games, war has raged. Generation upon generation of fanboy has thrown himself upon the flames of battle in the name of his chosen machine. Not for him, the petty civilian conceits of fear, self-preservation, logic or coherent sentence structure. For the holy pride of the electronic device he happened to choose to buy, the fight is all, and he will use any weapon in his arsenal, be it graphics, storage medium or the word “gay” to attain victory.

Too long have the playgrounds and internet forums run red with the haemorrhaging common sense of these brave if misguided warriors, so we’ve decided to settle things once and for all. We’ve gone through the five generations before this one and used inarguable scientific methods to determine each winner. Our judging criteria may seem ludicrous and arbitrary, and they may well be. But remember, this is fanboy war we’re talking about here, so our methods are completely authentic.

Gamecube vs. PS2 vs. Xbox

Before you complain, we're leaving the Dreamcast out of this console tournament for two reasons. Firstly, it came out early enough to be out of step with the rest of the generation and died soon afterwards. Secondly, we all know that the DC is the best thing ever, so it's completely unfair to put these three also-rans up against it.

Arguably the last traditional console war before the big competitors started branching off in their own directions, last gen was a fierce battle. Sony obviously had the rock solid brand domination of the original PlayStation behind it, and a cool factor that could have made a cryogenically frozen Fonzie on a skiing holiday look positively sweaty. And the Xbox of course had raw, elephant-punching power and the mighty Microsoft dollar.

Nintendo's machine was far more technically capable than many give it credit for, had one of the best first-party line-ups ever seen from one of the best first-party developers (albeit a much smaller overall catalogue than the other two) and the then-unbreakably loyal Nintendo fan massive. The PS2 and Xbox had started to branch out into multimedia functionality, but the GC had a controller that looked weirder than a sumo gymnast but felt comfier in the hand than a hamster made of cushions.

So who really won? Truly, it's a difficult argument to settle in traditional terms, so lets cut straight to the fanboy science.

Even using cold, hard fanboy logic, a clear winner is hard to deduce, so we're going to bring another factor into play. One which throughout the ages has been the great reckoner. One which is universal to almost any hardware of any age as long as it uses a screen and has buttons. Yes friends, we're going to decide this based on which system can run Doom better.

The PS2 only had the PS1 version, which was fast and slick, but a bit gritty looking:

The Xbox not only had a good version of Doom, it could run BLOODY DOOM 3:

The Gamecube had no Doom:

Verdict: