Engadget Marks GameCube's 25th Anniversary With Retrospective on Its Best Games

The retrospective, written by Engadget staff, highlighted Animal Crossing as the start of the franchise. It reached US players in 2002 and was a modest success that grew over time through positive word of mouth, according to the article. Engadget wrote that the first Animal Crossing was surprisingly similar to newer entries, retaining a real-time clock, daily activities such as fishing, bug hunting and fossil collecting, an open-ended gameplay loop comparable to New Horizons, villagers capable of ridiculous statements, and K.K. Slider performing acoustic songs at the club on Saturday nights. The major difference was that the first game could not go online at all. Players instead altered friends' towns by taking their memory cards, teaching villagers crude sayings, leaving trash and returning the cards late at night.

Engadget also featured Eternal Darkness, calling it possibly the weirdest horror game ever made and, for the writer, one of the scariest. The article said every part of its design was meant to make players feel as if they were going insane, using fake instant deaths, audio drop-outs, sudden camera shifts and creepy bugs that appeared to crawl over the television. The game even pretended to delete saves and displayed a fake blue screen of death. Engadget wrote that Eternal Darkness may not have invented the idea of messing with the player, but it largely perfected it, and compared its effect to the roguelite fishing sim Dredge at night. The publication also noted that Nintendo published the game despite its gore. Beyond those tricks, Engadget described it as a strong third-person horror game with Lovecraft-inspired mythology, a dozen playable characters across multiple time periods spanning thousands of years, puzzles and combat, a mechanic for aiming at and cleaving off body parts, and a fairly involved magic system with RPG flavor. The downside, according to Engadget, is that it is not really playable now unless someone finds a working GameCube and game disc; it has never been re-released, ported or remastered, though that might change.

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the series' only GameCube release, was included as well. Engadget said that after the success of Awakening and Three Houses, it is hard to see what made the 2005 game so special, and that two decades later its presentation looks stiff and dated and it lacks the relationship mechanics loved by newcomers. The article added that Path of Radiance still contains many elements that later defined Fire Emblem, in prototypical form, because it was the first game in the series to make the jump to 3D. Developer Intelligent Systems had to figure out the mechanics for the first time, Engadget wrote, and the result remains fun to play. It also has one of the best stories in the series, with an English script that captures many nuances of the Japanese original, according to senior reporter Igor Bonifacic.

The retrospective also began a section on F-Zero GX, with the writer recalling the original Super NES F-Zero as a game they wore out as a teenager. Engadget noted that the futuristic space racer had only 15 courses, but described them as beautiful and challenging.