Tag Archives: gamecube

Glitches Involving Capricious Audio

A little while ago, Cary wrote a post about some glitches in a damaged copy of “The Last of Us” that ruined the game for her, which got me thinking about how much fun I have talking about glitches, no matter how bothersome they can be.  Because not all glitches are purely upsetting.  Some can be rather funny, too.  And so I decided to start a little mini-series talking about the glitches found in various games I’ve played.  Today’s topic, unpredictable sound.

Skipping is fun, but not when it comes to gaming: I first had skipping issues when I moved and two consoles didn’t fare quite as well as they had in the past.  These two unlucky consoles were my poor dear GameCube and my not as dear, but still poor, XBox (who was just a year old at the time, too).  That’s when issues began that I had never had before.  Months later, I plugged the Cube in for some joy, and I was confronted with some skipping music in that pirate’s cave place in “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door”.  Very odd, as it was the only area that decided to do that.  I suppose pirates like to skip?  They certainly like to sing (on TV, at least, which is very accurate).  Then, finding this great fun, the XBox decided to join in (I guess it was just emulating its big brother Cube, who was being a very bad influence) with “Star Wars: Battlefront II”, where I was subjected to more skipping and erratic music, especially in the Hoth level.  It really didn’t like that place at all.  (Considering the freezing experienced in “Tak 2” not long earlier, though, I really didn’t mind at that point.) Continue reading Glitches Involving Capricious Audio

My “Deserted Island” Games – Gamecube edition

Image by Flickr user Beto sound!
Image by Flickr user Beto sound!

I had a poignant relationship with our Gamecube. We had some absolutely wonderful times together, filled with sailing, slaying, and sleuthing. But it also rendered one of my biggest gaming disappointments in the form of Super Mario Sunshine.  (I tried, I really did, but it turned out to be one of the few Mario titles that just didn’t resonate with me. And that made me very sad. However, spoilers, I try to rectify things as you’ll see below.) I had very few titles for the system, which made making choices both easy and hard. Some were shoe-ins, while other required a good bit of mental debate.  Among some of our stored electronics, our Gamecube still sits. Waiting for its chance at resurrection! (Or, morbidly so, the death of the Wii.)

Continue reading My “Deserted Island” Games – Gamecube edition

Stage Complete: City Escape

Above screen shot authored by Flickr userSpicaGames.
Above screen shot authored by Flickr user
SpicaGames.

While the quality and stature of a game series is defined by the quality of the games that that comprise it, its individual levels or often just one level from one game that embody its ideals and goals. One would think that a level’s impact wouldn’t extend outside its own game, but not necessarily. Consider, games in a consistent series can vary greatly in terms of characters, stories, and settings, but what ties them all together is their gameplay; gameplay that is more than just partly defined by consistent level design. Therefore, we can have levels that act as paradigms of a series, stages that capture the essence of a series so well that they can become synonymous with the series as a whole. There are many levels that have been elevated to this status over the years, but today we’ll focus on “City Escape” from Sonic Adventure 2, which best characterizes what Sonic the Hedgehog was supposed to be after its transition into 3D.
Continue reading Stage Complete: City Escape

The Duck Discusses the GCN, PS2, and XBox Generation: Part 1-The Cubester

Hello, everyone.  I see you’ve come to read the Duck’s very first post on United We Game.  Well, for my first post, I thought I would start by discussing the pros and cons of a very nice generation of consoles, the time period that gave us Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s un-creatively named PlayStation 2, and Microsoft’s first video game console, the XBox.  Each console has good and bad qualities, and I felt like going over them, in three parts, with one post per console.

Just so you know, my favorite of all three is my darling PS2.  It is a wonderful console, and I’ve spent countless hours playing its delightful games, while it watched me gleefully with its little green and blue lights.  So you may think parts of these posts are a bit biased towards the PS2, but I assure you, dear readers, they are not.  Because my viewpoints aren’t opinions.  They’re facts.  Facts can’t be biased. Continue reading The Duck Discusses the GCN, PS2, and XBox Generation: Part 1-The Cubester