What made you decide to play all the GameCube games?
In August of 2024, I started on a journey to play through every GameCube game ever released. With over 650 games to play,
it will likely take me around 5 years to play through them all at the rate I'm going at now. It's a daunting task, but I've
had a lot of fun playing through tons of games I would have never given a second look at before.
The first time I ever considered playing through a full console library was when I heard that TheMexicanRunner beat
every NES game back in 2017. While it sounded fun to me at the time, I decided against it because I have a bad habit of
starting huge projects without finishing them. I also didn't see the point of playing through all the NES games since that had
already been done, and multiple other people were on their way to finishing the full NES library soon. I briefly considered
playing through all the Xbox 360 games, and I even saw someone on Twitch that started a full Xbox 360 library playthrough,
but seeing that person quit only a few games in really showed me how crazy this all sounded.
Eventually, in 2024, I saw a speedrunner named LackAttack start a full NES library playthrough, but this wasn't just
an ordinary playthrough. This was "Mission NES", his goal to beat every NES game and do a speedrun of each one. Now, if you
know anything about me, you probably know that I really love watching speedruns. In fact, that's the reason I followed LackAttack
in the first place. But seeing him play through tons of random NES games and routing the ones that nobody had speedrun before
(side note: it's crazy to think there are still some NES games that don't have speedruns) really gave me the inspiration
I needed to start a console library playthrough. I figured if someone can dedicate that much time to playing, routing, and speedrunning
hundreds of different games, I can put in the same amount of effort to play through a similar number of games on a more modern console.
Sure, the games would be longer, but I wouldn't be speedrunning each one.
With that, it was time to decide which console I would start a playthrough of. In the end, I considered three viable options:
The Nintendo 64, GameCube, or Xbox 360.
Why GameCube?
The main reason is that it's the system I grew up with. Although I had a Nintendo 64 earlier, most of my
childhood memories were spent watching my dad play games like Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was a little
too young to properly enjoy those games by myself. But with the GameCube, I was old enough to play games on my own or with
friends from school. I was old enough to actually learn how to play the game and appreciate the story the developers created.
I also have fond memories of going to the video store and picking out games to buy or rent, and I definitely remember getting
excited about new games I saw in TV commercials or Nintendo Power.
Another reason I like the GameCube is that I believe most of the games have aged really well. With the Nintendo 64,
game developers were still trying to figure out how to make 3D games, and a lot of games suffered for it.
Low resolutions, framerates, bad controls, awkward cameras, and outdated game design choices are common faults of Nintendo 64
games. Granted, most of that isn't really the developers' fault, but it was hard to give consumers what they wanted with the
limitations those consoles had, especially when you don't have many great 3D games to compare yourself to. By the time the
GameCube, Playstation 2, and Xbox came out, 3D games were the norm, and I believe games got better as a result.
A lot of what I just said about the GameCube also applies to the Xbox 360. Game developers were perfectly capable of
making engaging 3D games with smooth controls, and the console was more than powerful enough to create great games without sacrificing
performance or visuals. But the console does have a couple of drawbacks that I think make it worse for a full library playthrough.
First, there are over 2,100 Xbox 360 games, compared to around 650 on GameCube. That means a full library playthrough would take over
three times as long on Xbox 360. Next, there are plenty of online-only games or digital-only games that are no longer playable because
the official servers have been shut down. Third, Do you include all of the Xbox Live Arcade games? The Xbox Live
Indie Games? Even if you limited your playthroughs to games that were released physically and could be purchased in stores, there are still
tons of games. I also think it feels a little cheap to include some games and not others, but I can see the reason you'd exclude arcade and
indie games. The last reason, and this is more of a personal one, but I feel that the internet changed the way we play games, so more and
more developers started focusing on online multiplayer content and leaving the single-player mode as an afterthought. A lot of games also
had story DLC that is technically optional, so does that count as part of the game? There are just a lot of questions like these that you
don't have to answer by playing on a console that doesn't connect to the internet.
What order are you playing the games in?
I've chosen to play the games in release order because I think it's the most interesting way to experience them.
This way, I get to see how the games changed over time. It makes it easy to directly compare one game to another since
everything I played up to that point was available at the same time. We can know which game was the first to have a
specific feature, spot gaming trends as they're happening, and we avoid any problems from playing games out of order.
For example, I don't think it makes sense to play a 2001 game after a 2005 game and criticize it for having worse
graphics or fewer features than the newer game.
I've seen other console library completionists create polls where their viewers vote on the next game to play,
but I think that inevitably results in playing popular games first, leaving yourself with potentially hundreds of unpopular
or terrible games at the end of the gauntlet. There are pros and cons to every order you can come up with, but I think
release order has the most positives and the fewest negatives. The only two downsides I can think of with release order
are that popular games could be years away, and it's possible to get dealt a bunch of horrible games in a row with few good
games in sight.
What if a game doesn't have an ending?
If a game doesn't have a true ending, I just play for a while until I feel like I've experienced everything the game
has to offer. Of course, that can vary wildly depending on which game we're talking about, so let me give you a few examples.
Animal Crossing technically has some goals and challenges to complete, but I think I'd be doing the game a
disservice if I only did Tom Nook's chores and paid off my starting debt. The game is designed to be played for 30 minutes
to an hour a few times a week, so that's what I'm going to do until I get bored of it. Typically, I won't start a new game
until I've finished the one I'm playing now, but Animal Crossing (and a few others) will have to be an exception. When I get
tired of playing a game one day, I can switch over to playing Animal Crossing for half an hour before ending the stream, so
it can help break up the monotony if that becomes an issue.
There are also tons of retro game compilations on GameCube, and most of those games don't have endings, either.
For those, I plan to play each game and try to get a decent score in each one, but I don't think I'll linger on them for too
long. I can say for sure that I won't reach level 255 in Pac-Man or max out the score in Tetris, for example.
What about Sports games?
The short answer is that I play them for long enough to get an idea of what the game has to offer, which usually doesn't take
more than a few hours. I usually don't play full seasons because it gets very monotonous, but I do make a point to play a couple of games,
make a custom team, custom players, and go through all of the game's features. A lot of gamers complain about Sports games, especially the
yearly franchises, but I actually think most of them are pretty fun. I love making custom players based on my viewers, and it's always a
great time to see one of them clutch a game-winning goal or do something really cool. Older sports games also tend to have really
unrealistic physics, which makes the whole experience that much better. While I'm not particularly big on real-life sports, I actually
really like playing sports video games, for some reason.
When will you get to game x?
On average, I finish around two or three games a week, so if you know how many games there are between my current game and the one you're
interested in, you can estimate how long it will take for me to get to that game. For example, if I'm playing game #75, and you want to watch
me play game #90, you can expect it to be around 5-7 weeks before I get to it. Of course, this is just an estimate, so the actual wait time could
be different if I play a string of long games in a row.
If you want to see the list of games and the order I'm playing them in, check out my list here.
What did you think of game x?
You can see a list of pros and cons I wrote for each game on my Games Page, and my
tier list of each game here.
In the future, I'd like to write detailed reviews on games that left
an impression on me, but I'll have to save that for another time.
How are you playing the games?
I'm playing the games on a modded Wii with a hard drive containing all the games connected to it. While I like the idea of
having a physical collection of all the GameCube games, it's just not worth the roughly $22,000 it would cost to get them all.
I also don't care to keep up with physical media when an offline digital library works just as well. I could emulate the
games, but I think it's better to play on real hardware, so I avoid any potential emulator inaccuracies or
performance issues. That being said, I may have to emulate some games if they don't work correctly on my Wii. I don't expect
that to be a problem, but I think there may still be a handful of games that aren't compatible with Nintendont yet.
As for capturing the games, I use a Retrotink 5x to upscale the component output from my Wii, and an Avermedia Live Gamer HD 2
to capture the footage. The quality isn't perfect, but I'm happy with the result.