GameCube Features

Contributors: Chris Antista, Charlie Barratt, Brett Elston, Matthew Keast, Shane Patterson, Mikel Reparaz

Hundreds of games are released every year, then played and forgotten by the next. Only a dozen or so will be remembered a decade from now, and only a few of those will have any lasting impact on the medium as a whole.

Which upcoming titles stand the best chance of leaving that meaningful mark?

Deep down, you realize they’re not real. You understand that what you’re seeing on screen is only pixels and polygons, that what you’re talking to is only a voice actor and that what you’re supposedly interacting with is only a fancy collection of programming codes. Sometimes, however, you can’t help but be a little fooled. Especially when you’re a young, dumb, naïve and impressionable kid…

There are two editorial gold mines in the videogame-list business. The first is box art, because laughing at other people’s hard work gone awry is fantastically easy. Right behind those myriad articles about game packaging are lists devoted to poking fun at their very names – and we’re not afraid to go back to the well for another bit of fun.

Mark Hamill unleashes a fiendish cackle that simultaneously sounds like skin ripped from flesh and fingernails dragged across corrugated iron. If the bowels of hell have a soundtrack, this is it.

With the 3DS less than a week from launch, it can be easy to forget that the handheld – while extremely impressive – isn’t Nintendo’s first attempt to make a 3D system. After its success with Game & Watch and the Game Boy, Nintendo launched its third portable system in the mid-‘90s, when virtual reality was seen as the future of gaming. Envisioned as a successor to the Game Boy, the Virtual Boy would deliver true 3D gaming at an affordable price. It would also be widely considered the single worst piece of hardware Nintendo ever produced, if not the worst game machine ever produced, period...

With Nintendo’s handheld future on the horizon, let’s take a moment to think about its past. As the 80s began and games like Space Invaders was becoming the hottest things around, Nintendo not only started work on their own arcade games, but also found a new market by repurposing newly cheapened calculator tech and making the first must-have handheld videogames in the form of Game & Watch...

It’s comforting, isn’t it? Though our hobby is famous for igniting stupid flame wars and for inspiring stubborn fanboy bias, all gamers – no matter what their console or genre preference – can agree on, and rally around, one unassailable truth. Party games suck.

It’s comforting, isn’t it? Though our hobby is famous for igniting stupid flame wars and for inspiring stubborn fanboy bias, all gamers – no matter what their console or genre preference – can agree on, and rally around, one unassailable truth. Party games suck.

It’s comforting, isn’t it? Though our hobby is famous for igniting stupid flame wars and for inspiring stubborn fanboy bias, all gamers – no matter what their console or genre preference – can agree on, and rally around, one unassailable truth. Party games suck.

Ever wondered what it would be like to have video game characters in your Pokemon party? Why choose boring old Bulbasaur when you can choose a beautiful Kasumi? Or a level 50 Sackboy?

We've given 21 game characters the Pokemon treatment, with four moves to choose from and some evolutionary states too.

Who would you choose?