It's worth a try.
The Nintendo GameCube Appreciation and Collecting Thread.
- Thread starter Seik
- Start date
Theonik
Member
Like a very rough version of Vanquish in some ways. Capcom really rushed it out the gate so it's not that good, but it is quite challenging and you can get some fun out of it.
Patrick Young
Member
I bought everything I need to load Swiss on my GameCube. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to reverse inverted controls with Cheat Engine and it feels like an impossible task. I should've known trying to locate analog controls would be a nightmare.
I wanna play Mario Sunshine with normal controls!
I wanna play Mario Sunshine with normal controls!
TheMoon
Member
PAL cover art is the king for RE4 though
Classy AF.
Japanese covers for RE games almost always suck. REmake was the only good.
Classic Mikami quality work that you need to appreciate for what it is trying to do and not come from with a "man, want some rad action shooting game that plays like all the other ones I already like."
Impotaku
Member
Lets not pretend that the western covers are any better.
Impotaku
Member
PAL is Western! Glance upwards
Yeah i don't think much of that pal cover, you wouldnt even know it was a resident evil game if it didn't have the title on it. Trying to be too arty for it's own good.
I said western to include both the USA & Europe as both regions have some really terrible covers.
Mmm dat quality lol
D.Lo
Member
That RE4 cover is one of the best covers of all time.
Stands out starkly in seas of 'CGI action/floating character head' crappy covers.
On average PAL covers are superior to American ones, all the way back to the NES, eg Mega Man games.
PAL is always more likely to get the Japanese art while the US gets the aforementioned CGI action/floating character head busy mess.
Heck even the plain REmake cover is much classier than the GCI action nonsense of the US one, and RE Zero cover is quite classy.
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
On the other hand... The boring spines of PAL covers which almost never have color or logos, just standard text.
A shelf of PAL games is pretty boring to look at, while NTSC is a splash of color and neat fonts.
D.Lo
Member
To each their own. Chainsaw bag-head guy is pretty iconic of RE4 for me.
Are you talking about Gamecube games here?
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
That's a big chunk of games.
A high percentage of Gamecube game spines do have generic text in PAL.
But I was talking PAL in general.
D.Lo
Member
Well true, Sony Europe was a bit crap, what with all the terrible 50Hz crap too.
that's really not true. Only generally some crap efforts by 3rd party multi-plats, probably so they matched the PS2 versions. Sony Europe's poison spread to Nintendo!
And PAL have the logo in the much better place at the top.
Hmm weird. I'm looking at my shelf and it's only really particular developers that use the plain text (EA stands out, for example, as a boring plain text abuser), they're otherwise pretty colourful with unique fonts. This is across both my retro and later gen shelves.
Not all PAL games are the same though, you might be thinking particularly of EU games perhaps?
TheMoon
Member
And you're absolutely right there.
Logos do happen but it's not the norm across most platforms.
Nintendo AU is this weird hybrid of being run through NOE mostly but also taking on some NOA characteristics like spine logos and the thin DS/3DS cases since they never needed the big multilingual manuals and thus could do with the slim JP/NA/ cases.
D.Lo
Member
That's true. Thin, single language DS/3DS cases are so much better than the crappy imported 3rd party EU cases.
Same goes for GB/GBA, AU boxes are great, EU boxes are tiny text multi-lingual nightmares.
-shadow-
Member
This always has me scratching my head with Europe. Most games don't have a logo on the spine, just the title in the usual generic font. But than there's exceptions like: Game & Wario, Lego City Undercover, Mario Kart 8, Nintendo Land and Super Mario Maker. It's such a strange mixed bag and I wonder if they'll ever go for either one or the other. Because this really gets under my skin for some reason.
I own it but I bought it from a collector a few years ago.
shanafan
Member
Is it my eyes, or are all those GameCube games sealed?
D.Lo
Member
Looks like they're in protective sleeves.
Pancakes R Us
Member
Oh, my optical drives are slot-loading and incompatible with 8cm discs.
I'm happy to play my GC games direct from discs, no interest in booting from SD cards or back-up discs. I only want to use homebrew to play GB/C/A games with the best visuals possible via Gameboy Player. Swiss, I think.
alf717
Member
Check out Home Bros. or the other save game exploits that allow you to boot homebrew. I use Home Bros with Melee but Splinter Cell, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, 007 Agent Under Fire or BMX XXX can be used to trigger an exploit to load GBi. You will need a soft mod Wii with GC support to add files to the GC memory cards.
Probably getting a PAL Cube in the near future for RGB support on a framemeister (mainly for GB/GBA games), wondering if any of you guys can help me out with some questions I have before I commit to it (I'm in the US):
-Will SD Media Launcher and Swiss give me the option to play any region game (primarily NTSC-U) with proper resolution and refresh rate on the PAL Cube? Are there any potential issues I could run into?
-NTSC-U power cable, mem cards, controllers, GB player etc. will all work fine on the PAL unit right? Double checking here as I'm pretty sure the answer for all of these is yes.
-Will SD Media Launcher and Swiss give me the option to play any region game (primarily NTSC-U) with proper resolution and refresh rate on the PAL Cube? Are there any potential issues I could run into?
-NTSC-U power cable, mem cards, controllers, GB player etc. will all work fine on the PAL unit right? Double checking here as I'm pretty sure the answer for all of these is yes.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
You'd need to disc swap every time you want to start a game, which sucks. Some games don't have change disc saves (classic example is Metal Gear), so those won't work properly if you disc swapped to start it.
There are also some issues with running some NTSC-J games on any other system using these soft-region change mods -- you'll end up with messed up text.
SuperCambot
Banned
What the crap? Never even heard of that...
Sounds like I'll be good to go then, I have a Wii for those very few games that won't work with this set up.
Thanks!
Where is a good spot to order a PAL GC from?
I might still just wait for the GC Video to become more prevalent to compare prices. PAL GC, mod chip, and Scart cable shipped may be around the same price. The other downside of the PAL setup is the output looks sightly softer than NTSC and doesn't support 480p (source: Retro RGB).
I might still just wait for the GC Video to become more prevalent to compare prices. PAL GC, mod chip, and Scart cable shipped may be around the same price. The other downside of the PAL setup is the output looks sightly softer than NTSC and doesn't support 480p (source: Retro RGB).
I dunno about any import shops, I was just gonna order one from eBay lol. I'm pretty sure there are more than a few mislabled Gamecubes on there though (lots of NTSC-U units being sold as PAL ones, probably an error with eBays generic listing names) so you have to be extra careful you're getting the right region one.
So I have a question about discs and durability. I was going through an old bin of gamecube and ps2 discs from my childhood, and found that most of them... well they've been scratched to hell.
Is there any way to figure out the playability of these without trying to play through the whole game again and see if I get a disc error? I didn't know if there was any method.
Is there any way to figure out the playability of these without trying to play through the whole game again and see if I get a disc error? I didn't know if there was any method.
TheMoon
Member
Go to the shrine and pray real hard. Answers might be revealed.
No clue. I doubt there's a magic disc reader that can tell you if a tiny part is irredeemable fucked.
Go to the shrine and pray real hard. Answers might be revealed.
No clue. I doubt there's a magic disc reader that can tell you if a tiny part is irredeemable fucked.
Haha, I sort of figured. I might just repurchase the ones I care about. Some of these... are pretty scratched haha, like through a blender scratched.
Very interesting.
I still use my Datel Freeloader to sporadically play imports on my PAL GameCube. Since the majority of my games is PAL, and the imports I go back to the most are 1-disc-only arcade titles (such as Japanese Beach Spikers), I had no real issues so far. Am I going to run into troubles with, say, multidisc US Resident Evil games?
Go to the shrine and pray real hard. Answers might be revealed.
No clue. I doubt there's a magic disc reader that can tell you if a tiny part is irredeemable fucked.
Lol, I always loved this shrine. The Iwata-pic puts it over the edge in awesomeness. Btw, where did the pic originally came from? Seen it on gaf for years, but would love to hear the origin story. AceBandages old cellar?
Pancakes R Us
Member
NTSC power cable and memory cards etc. should work fine. I've had import systems here in the UK for years, and have used PAL power cables. I've also used NTSC U memory cards on PAL consoles. You just can't mix up different region saves, from what I understand - not that I've ever tried it.
Yep all good.
Re: Saves, I mix NTSC U and PAL but never NTSC J. I think it's the Japanese saves that cause the problem. Wouldn't hurt to have a memory card each to keep PAL and NTSC U separate though I guess.
alf717
Member
Rip them. If you get a good checksum and no errors during the rip process the discs are fine.
TheMoon
Member
My GCN saves are a giant party of PAL and NTSC-U on the same cards. It's fine. I have a single Japanese game so far but haven't tried saving yet.
D.Lo
Member
Some info for everyone:
GameCube Memory cards can be formatted to Japanese mode or western mode. A region switching NTSC cube (the simple switch mod) switches between bios modes, and will try and format the memory card to the bios of the mode it is in.
If using a soft mod (eg Freeloader) to load the game, you can use Japanese and western saves on the same card, because it's always loading in western mode and will never tried to format it.
But, some Japanese games have small issues in western mode. You can see some random characters in save menus, because it's trying to render Japanese Characters in western ascii. The game with the biggest issues is probably F-Zero GX which has some graphics missing, but it can be fixed with an action replay code.
Anyways, nice to know where it all came from!
Tal Shiar Agent
Banned
Any word on the progress of the HDMI dongle?
Any reason to prefer it over the PS2 version?
foobarry81
Member
You sort of need a Japanese PS2 to play it whereas the GC is "made region free" fairly hassle free with a Freeloader?
Oh, right. Owning two PS2s (a Japanese one and a modded PAL console), I never take import gaming as a possible issue, but your point is good. I assumed it had to do with exclusive characters or better performances (PS2 version seems fairly cheap on ebay, whereas GC one gets way more expensive).
Well my PS2 is equiped with FreeMcBoot, so i can load imports/burns/HDload stuff, but yeah i'm thinking the cube version performs better. I havent heard either way, but i've also got freeloader for GC, and usually GC performs better than PS2 for multiplatform.
D.Lo
Member
How had I never heard of this? I'm a big Konami fan.
Doh, Gamecube version is expensive!
Unless there's something crazy wrong with the GC version of a game, isn't it always the superior version? The GCN has vastly superior image quality via component. Back in the day the only argument for some PS2 versions over GC was stuff online modes which are not relevant now (and were barely relevant then).
Doh, Gamecube version is expensive!
Unless there's something crazy wrong with the GC version of a game, isn't it always the superior version? The GCN has vastly superior image quality via component. Back in the day the only argument for some PS2 versions over GC was stuff online modes which are not relevant now (and were barely relevant then).
Yep!
IrishNinja
Member
eww