Best GameCube Games

Best Gamecube Games: The GameCube occupies a special place in Nintendo history. Released in 2001, the square box — perfect with a lunch pail style handle — cemented Nintendo as a housewares corporation unafraid of taking risks in the face of stiff championship from Sony and Microsoft.

Its quirky controller made the N64’s boomerang pad seem bland, and, surprisingly, it has sustained to this day thanks to the Super Smash Bros. franchise. It used small discs that loaded under its pop-up cover, meaning it was solely a game athenaeum. Most importantly, though, the GameCube was home to a large library of great games.

Best Multiplayer Gamecube Games

The Game Cubehas moved beyond its place as an provocative, but antiquated, Nintendo console, to finding new love thanks to nostalgic sentimentality. It’s officially a retro system, and Nintendo’s first foray into disc-based gaming brought us some of the best games ever discovered, including the Metroid Prime series.

There’s no Game Cube Classic (yet?), so to play these, you’ll need to either dig out your original GameCube or dust off your Nintendo Wii. Since the Wii has component-out, it’s arguably the better way to play on state-of-the-art Tv sets, especially given the unreasonable price of the GameCube official component cables.

This is our unambiguous, set-in-stone guide to the best GameCube games of all time. The list was originally put simultaneously by IGN’s GameCube team and written by Matt Casamassina and Mark Bozon.

The 25 Best Nintendo GameCube Games

Click on the name of a game below to jump to its description and find out what makes these games the best Nintendo Switch games so far.

Best Gamecube Games Of All Time

Nintendo inaugurated its fourth home game console, the GameCube, in late 2001. Despite earning crushed in the numbers game over the next six years by the PlayStation 2 juggernaut, it still played host to many tournament gaming experiences for millions of people.

The GameCube feels like an odd duck in hindsight, with its funky controller, compact design (complete with carrying handle), and uncommon 3-inch optical media. It lagged in online performance, and its relatively low-capacity media (and lack of DVD player functionality) held it back connected to its challengers. Among its hardware highlights, it launched the first practicable wireless game controller, the WaveBird, which represented astoundingly well for the time.

Software was constantly the star of the show on the Game Cube, and Nintendo continued its running sovereignty of the young-at-heart market, inaugurating beloved new games starring Mario, Link, Samus, Kirby, Donkey Kong, and the Animal Crossroad crew.

In fact, there are tons of great GameCube games—dozens of high-quality titles exist within its 650+ game software library. But if you’re looking for the best of the best, or perhaps you’re searching the Game Cube for the first time, you’ve got to start somewhere. And that’s where this list comes in.

While trying to determine the 10 best GameCube games, I found about six or seven undeniable monuments and about 10 to 15 really awesome games that could be interchanged with several titles on this list. So don’t be too sore if you don’t see your favored games here. There are others out there, and these 10 just hit an arbitrary cut-off point.

If you’re playing GameCube for the first time, I envy you. You are about to discover a magical game of chance platform.

Best Selling Gamecube Games

It doesn’t count that the GameCube is over 15 years old, expressing back at this list of the best Game Cube games fills us with nostalgia-twinkling joy. Nintendo’s enigmatic fourth home console suggests the beginning of Nintendo’s tinkering with the quirky, but also transported some of the purest gaming experiences of all time. While it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as Sony’s PS2 or as powerful as Microsoft’s Xbox, Nintendo’s bizarre little box – outright with a fashionable handle and small discs – held its own with a unique and eclectic catalog of first and third-party titles.

We live in hope that Nintendo may bring its classic Gamecube titles to Switch via a new version of Virtual Console – as was rumoured back in 2016, with Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi’s Mansion and Super Smash Bros. Melee all reported as being in testing – but for now, we can console ourselves with ability to play Switch games using a GameCube controller.

GameCube may not have had the most games, but it was never lacking in quality, playing host to some of the best entries in the Zelda, Metroid, and Resident Evil franchises while also bringing an array of incredible, wholly original content. It’s time to get weird, as we celebrate the 25 best GameCube games ever made.

Being cool means being comfortable in one’s own skin, ignoring peer pressure, and forging a unique path with undersized discs and a convenient handle. With its playfully purple exterior, quirky awesome controller, and a library of some of the most innovative and inventive games ever released on one platform, the GameCube may be the most Nintendo console the company has ever produced, and as a result, it’s also one of the most beloved.

Though its library may not have been as packed as some of its competitors, much of what the GameCube did have was destined to become classic, changing gamers’ expectations for even their most revered franchises in addition to being just plain fun. While it’s never an easy task to rank an abundance of greatness, the staff here at Goomba Stomp has determined the list of the 35 best games Nintendo’s little console had to offer.

Gamecube Best Games

Combine the frantic, mission-based first-person shooter action of the N64’s Goldeneye with a few episodes of Quantum Leap, and what results is the very weird and very awesome Time Splitters 2. Fans of Rare’s Bond will feel right at home with the look and feel of this sequel to the PS2 exclusive, which sees players taking on the role of a space marine named Cortez, who must time-travel to various points in the past (and our current future) and assume the role of someone living there to stop an evil alien race from using magic crystals to alter history and take over the universe. It’s silly stuff from a plot perspective, but what other game allows the players to be an Old West bounty hunter in one stage, a Prohibition-Era Chicago detective in another, and a 24th-century robot in the next?

The amount of variety, coupled with slick, responsive controls and plenty of bizarre side content, like decapitating zombies or collecting bananas, makes the single-player experience a memorable one. Even better, Time Splitters 2 allows for split-screen co-op in its story mode, doubling the firepower (or brick power), so taking down those nasty ETs is, even more, fun. With a host of multiplayer options standard for the time and the cheesiness of a Syfy Channel movie, Time Splitters 2 is one of most purely entertaining titles the GameCube has to offer.

Twin Snakes WikiAfter years of watching the Playstation crowd getting game after game, GCN owners were treated to a beautifully-crafted remake of one of the greatest games in our industry’s history. As a joint collaboration between Nintendo, Silicon Knights, and publisher Konami, Snake was given a second life on Nintendo’s consoles, including new story elements and weapons, as well as an immersive first-person mode. Aside from being a much-needed addition to the mature-rated games on GameCube, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes showed that Konami still had faith in the console, as it became one of the top cult classic titles on the system, and paved the way for Snake’s appearance in the highly anticipated Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii.