Why 80's Arcade Games are the Best

Reminiscing the 80s would never be complete without mentioning about 80s arcade games. An arcade game is a coin-operated gaming machine that you would usually find in entertainment centers, video arcades, and even in restaurants. Popular arcade games are redemption games that give players rewards based on their score in the game; computer-controlled video games; and pinball games wherein the player manipulates one or more metal balls on a playfield.

Flashback

Arcade games began to be so popular in the early 70s. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney made Atari that released the Pong video game (based on ping-pong or table tennis) that became almost everyone’s favorite. The success of the Pong video game spawned lots of imitations and created more and more avid video players. Eventually video game arcades abounded through the 80s. They can be found in the malls, department stores, bars and even in restaurants and movie houses. They’re everywhere in the United States

Popular 80s Arcade Games

In the 80s, arcade games became even more popular. Some of the most influential 80s arcade games were the following:

Space Invaders – This game, one of the predecessors of modern video games, was created by the Japanese Toshihiro Nishikado. It was first released in 1978 in Japan. This arcade game mimics a shooting gallery with a movable laser (resembling a cannon) placed below the video screen. There were video aliens that were designed to disrupt the game by passing across the screen and by raining bombs and rays that are deadly. The goal of the player is to avoid those deadly rays and bombs and shoot the aliens so that they won’t reach the bottom of the screen or else, he or she will lose in the game.

Pac-Man – This was created by Namco and was first distributed in 1980. It game remains to be popular today though it has already taken new forms. Compared to many 80s arcade games, Pac-Man was not violent, was easy to play and was enjoyable, which explains why it clicked both to young and old, girls and boys alike.

The yellow circle with a mouth called Pac-Man makes people remember this game so well through the years. The game is played by maneuvering Pac-Man through the maze, letting him eat small dots and different item prizes along the way. Ghosts named Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde on the other hand chase Pac-Man.

Donkey Kong – Another video game that emerged so popular among other 80s arcade games was the Donkey Kong. It was made by Nintendo and was introduced in 1981. Basically the game is played by maneuvering the chief character, Mario (formerly Jumpman),across a series of platforms. As Mario goes through the platforms, he has to get rid of obstacles that prevent him from rescuing a damsel in distress from the hands of Donkey Kong.

The abovementioned are only some of the most popular 80s arcade games. There were also the Battlezone, Pengo, Tron, Tetris, Rubik’s cube and many others. The craze for 80s arcade games only began to subside in the late 80s when newer forms of entertainment were being introduced such as advanced home video game consoles but 80s arcade games didn’t totally die out until the coming of fighting games like the Street Fighter ll that required two players.

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Rumination on the PS3 Game and Console

PS3 games have been long awaited by its fans. With the expected release of the PlayStation 3 console in November, 2006 approaching fast, gamers are enthusiastic about the new experience it offers. Sadly though, the new experience comes together with the PS3 games itself and not the game console that offers backward compatibility. Ergo, it is the new format of the games that is much awaited and not the actual player.

Just what does the new format of the PS3 games offer? Well due to its being written on Blue-Ray Discs, the gaming experience would be parallel to HDTV in terms of its quality. This is because of the ability of the disc to store 10x as much data as the DVD. Having the ability to store more data, it means that programmers are able to incorporate more features that would enable it to deliver high picture and interactive quality.

Given that, how much quality do we really need to enjoy a game? Gamers in the early 90s were satisfied with the picture and gaming quality of the popular Pacman game from Nintendo, the level at which people of today are satisfied with the quality of their gaming experience has always been in accord with the developments in technology. PS3 games would expectedly offer picture quality that is unmatched by any of its competitors.

After PS3 games, then what? Well, one would think that developments in the next decade would definitely grow at an exponential rate. It would not be unreasonable to expect that developers would come up with some gaming console that would enable its users to literally be in the game. Considering that virtual games are now present, continued research on the technology would probably yield devices that can be hook to our nervous system, and would function somewhat like holograms. It is, I guess, only our human imagination that truly limits what we can come up with in the next couple of decades.

So what are the potential problems that could arise from this advancement in gaming technology aside the declining academic performance of children? While PS3 games would definitely give out optimum performance, another aspect that grows in accordance to developments in technology is the cost.

The production of the game console, which is actually more than just a gaming console, as well as the PS3 games would most probably be only affordable for the high-end consumers. That is, during the first two years of production. Fortunately, the prices always go down after a couple of years. That is the only time when children, as well as adults in the lower ranks of society are able to enjoy a magnificent gaming experience. I guess that's how things really work in this society.

Oh well. But nevertheless, PS3 games and all the others that will come soon will always be appreciated by the consumers. They would not really manufacture these things had there been no demand for it, won't they? So enough with the ranting about its costs. PS3 games and others will remain and will continue to develop. So long as the technology is available, people will always find ways to apply them to whatever they could think of.

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Sega Dreamcast

The Sega Dreamcast (Japanese: ƒhƒŠ[ƒ€ƒLƒƒƒXƒg; code-named "Blackbelt," "Dural," and "Katana" during development) is Sega's last video game console. An attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system, it was designed to supercede Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Nintendo 64, and although generally considered to be "ahead of its time" (literally fifteen months before the PlayStation 2 and three years before GameCube or Xbox) it failed to gather enough momentum before the release of the PlayStation 2 in March 2000. After the Dreamcast was discontinued, Sega had no other plans to release another console.

History
When the time came to design the successor to the Sega Saturn, the new President of Sega, Shoichiro Irimajiri, took the unusual step of hiring an outsider. He hired Tatsuo Yamamoto from IBM Austin to head a skunkworks group to develop the next-generation console. However, it soon became apparent that the existing Japanese hardware group led by Hideki Sato did not want to relinquish control of hardware, and so there were two competing designs led by two different groups.

Design
The Japanese group led by Hideki Sato settled on an Hitachi SH4 processor with a PowerVR graphics processor developed by VideoLogic (now Imagination Technologies) and manufactured by NEC. This was originally codenamed "White Belt". The first Japanese prototype boards were silkscreened "Guppy" and the later ones "Katana".

The US skunkworks group (in a secret suite at the 303 Twin Dolphin Drive building) led by Tatsuo Yamamoto settled on an IBM/Motorola PowerPC 603e processor with a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 graphics processor, which was originally codenamed "Black Belt". The first US prototype boards were silkscreened "Shark" (in response to the Japanese "Guppy").

The Japanese hardware was codenamed "Dural", then later, "Katana". "Black Belt" was the only codename used by the US hardware team (they called themselves the "Black Belt team").

In July 1997, it was decided that the Japanese "Katana" would be the chosen format, renamed Dreamcast. In September 1997, 3Dfx filed a lawsuit against Sega and NEC (later including VideoLogic), claiming "breach of contract", although they later settled.

Launch
The Dreamcast was released on November 27, 1998 in Japan, on September 9, 1999 in the United States (the date 9/9/99 featured heavily in US promotion) and on October 14, 1999 in Europe. The tagline used to promote the console in the US was, "It's thinking", and in Europe "Up to 6 Billion Players". The vagueness of these campaigns and almost total lack of any in game footage has been touted as one of the reasons for the Dreamcast's eventual downfall. Many Americans knew that the Dreamcast was coming, but didn't know what one was. The Dreamcast was the first console to include a built-in modem and Internet support for online gaming. It enjoyed brisk sales in its first season and was one of Sega's most successful hardware units. In the United States alone, a record 300,000 units (citation Maclean's September 24, 1999) had been pre-ordered before launch and Sega sold 500,000 consoles in just two weeks (including 225,000 sold on the first 24 hours which became a video game record until the PlayStation 2 launched a year later). In fact, due to brisk sales and hardware shortages, Sega was unable to fulfill all of the advance orders. Sega confirmed that it made $98.4 million on combined hardware and software sales with the Dreamcast with its September 9, 1999 launch. Sega even compared the record figure to the opening day gross of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which made $28.5 million during the first 24 hours in theaters.

Before the launch in the United States, Sega had already taken the extra step in displaying Dreamcast's capabilities in stores nationwide. Much like the PlayStation's launch in North America, the displays of titles such as Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Power Stone and Hydro Thunder helped the Dreamcast succeed in the first year. Although Electronic Arts declined to support the Dreamcast which included the omission of its popular sports games (due in part to EA's losses from the past Sega Saturn), Sega Sports titles helped to fill that void.

Competition
In April 1999, Sony announced its PlayStation 2, designed to be backwards-compatible with the older PlayStation, and released the unit in Japan in March 2000. Sony's press release, despite being a year ahead of the launch of the PS2, was enough to divert a lot of attention from Sega. Even though Sega touted the Dreamcast's online capabilities (the PS2 would not go online until late 2002), American public attention was focused upon the PlayStation 2's ability to play DVDs (the DVD format did not catch on in Japan until after the release of the PS2 as the LD was the established standard). Electronic Arts also announced its support for the PS2. This, combined with the fact that Sega had dropped support for the Saturn and did not offer backwards compatibility led to poorer sales in America.

In 2000, the announcement of the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube was widely regarded as the last straw for the Dreamcast, since both competitors had deep pockets (like Sony) which fueled speculation that Sega did not have the resources for a prolonged marketing campaign.

End of production
On January 31, 2001, Sega announced that production of Dreamcast hardware was to be discontinued by March of that year, although the 50 to 60 titles still in production would be published. The last North American release was NHL 2K2, which was released in February of 2002. With the company announcing no plans to develop a next-generation successor to the Dreamcast, this was Sega's last foray into the home console business. By the time Sega decided to cease development of the Dreamcast, about 10 million consoles had been sold. Though the Dreamcast was officially discontinued in early 2001, commercial games were still developed and released afterwards, particularly in Japan. Many consider the critically acclaimed arcade shooter Ikaruga developed by Treasure to be the Dreamcast's swan song. It was released in September 2002 in Japan only after a large amount of speculation on the game's fate; its US release was on the Nintendo GameCube in April 2003. Hacked unreleased games like Propeller Arena and Half-Life continued to become available to the public by program decoders like Echelon. On February 24, 2004, Sega released their final Dreamcast game, Puyo Pop Fever, although a small number of third-party games are still being released, such as Trizeal, Rajirugi, and most recently Under Defeat (released in March 2006).

Despite its short lifespan, the Dreamcast is still a very popular and highly-regarded console among many fans due to its impressive library of both mainstream and quirky titles. It is even starting to become a cult classic, as the system is getting harder to find (in fact, although the Dreamcast was officially discontinued in January 2001, Sega continued to produce the console for a short time afterwards due to rising demand, not least among collectors and hard-core fans).

Several Dreamcast emulation projects have emerged after the Dreamcast's end of production, with Chankast being the most notable.

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Future Improvements To World Of Warcraft

A year has passed since Blizzards release of their massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft. On release, there were a lot of mistakes, a lot of imbalances and a lack of high end content. Since then, Blizzard has fixed many of its issues, and added enough content to keep the hardcore gamers interested, for now.

The first month that blizzard had the game live was sketchy at best. The realm servers were constantly being taken down for maintenance. The player base was upset with the state of the game. Problems will be inherent in an undertaking as large as WOW. To those on the affected servers, the response time from Blizzard was abysmal. Some servers were down for days. Blizzard made amends by giving free play time to the players with characters on those servers. Since then, blizzard has picked up their service, and the only significant time the servers have problems is the day or so that a new patch comes out.

The raid content of the game on release was limited to The Molten Core and Onyxia. For the first three months that was plenty, the most avid WOW players were still busy leveling and getting good gear from the high level five man instances. The top guilds, however, would have these encounters mastered in short order once they got into them. After two months of raiding nothing but these encounters they became tedious. Many players lacking faith in Blizzard grew bored with the game. Blackwing Lair was released a few months ago, and has proven to be a sufficient challenge. Ahn’Qiraj was just released. Those finished with Blackwing Lair will be looking forward to the new challenges it presents. As long as Blizzard can keep up with the progression of best raiding group, no player can complain about lack of activity at level 60.

The honor system and battlegrounds released half a year after the game hit shelves brought more structure to Player versus Player interaction (PvP) by ranking and rewarding players for killing other players close to their own level. While it doesn’t discourage ‘ganking,’ killing a player much lower in level than the attacker, it provides purpose to fighting the opposing faction.

At the core of every good video game is a high quality user interface. It’s the way the player interacts with the game environment. WOW provided a fine interface at the start, but as the game progressed, it became clear certain things were lacking. Thankfully, Blizzard supported Custom User Interfaces by allowing ‘add-ons’ to be incorporated easily into their game. Using these custom interfaces, players can get exactly what they need out of the game to play to the maximum efficiency. The best of the interfaces have been incorporated into WOW’s base user interface.

Blizzard does a lot to make sure their games are of the highest quality when they are released. After a full year of beta testing, WOW was a much better game than when it started. Though at that time, the game was not perfect, and perhaps not quite ready for retail. Over the last year, the game has made leaps and bounds to become the best massively multiplayer online game on the market. With a larger test group, and user input, Blizzard has been able to shape WOW into the game it should have been on release.

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Hunter Crowell is a researcher, avid online gamer, and creator of www.wow-gold-price-list.com/ ">WOW Gold Price List, helping players find the cheapest place to buy their gold.

Super Nintendo

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, also known as Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit video game console released by Nintendo in North America, Brazil, Europe, and Australia. In Japan it is known as the Super Famicom (Family Computer). In South Korea, it is known as the Super Comboy and was distributed by Hyundai Electronics.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was Nintendo's second home console, following the Nintendo Entertainment System (often abbreviated to NES, released as the Famicom in Japan). Whereas the earlier system had struggled in Europe and large parts of Asia the SNES proved to be a global success, albeit one that could not match its predecessor's popularity in South East Asia and North America—due in part to increased competition from Sega's Mega Drive console (released in North America as the Genesis). Despite its relatively late start, the SNES became the best selling console of the 16-bit era but only after its competitor Sega had pulled out of the 16-bit market to focus on its 32-bit next generation console.

History
Even as the original NES/Famicom was at the height of its popularity, several companies were launching their own consoles. In 1987 and 1988 respectively, NEC and Sega launched their contenders, the PC Engine and the Mega Drive, one of the first 16-bit home gaming systems. Although the NES would continue to dominate the video game industry for years to come, Nintendo's hardware was beginning to show its age, and though Nintendo executives initially showed little interest in developing a new system, Sega and NEC's growing market share with consoles like the Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) and the PC Engine soon forced Nintendo to reconsider.

Masayuki Uemura, the man responsible for designing the Famicom several years earlier, was put in charge of the design of the console and the Super Famicom was released in Japan on November 21, 1990 for ¥25,000. An instant blockbuster, Nintendo's initial shipment of 300,000 units quickly sold out within hours. The system was so popular that it was said to have attracted the attention of the Yakuza, leading to the decision to ship the devices at night in order to avoid robbery. In Japan, the Super Famicom effortlessly outsold its chief rival, the Mega Drive, and Nintendo retained control over approximately 85% of the Japanese console market thanks, in part, to Nintendo's retention of most of its key third party developers from the Famicom, including Capcom, Konami, Tecmo, Square Co., Ltd., Koei, and Enix.

Nine months later, on August 13, 1991, Nintendo released the Super Famicom in North America with a new redesigned case as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Initially sold for a price of $199 US, the North American package included the game Super Mario World. The SNES was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland in April 1992 for £150, with a German release following a few weeks later. The PAL versions of the console looked identical to the Japanese Super Famicom, except for labelling.

Nintendo's Japanese market dominance was, however, not repeated in the American and European markets. By the time of launch the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis had already become firmly entrenched in the US and European marketplace, helped by the lower cost of the Mega Drive/Genesis console and games, Sega's aggressive marketing in North America, and overall popularity of the console alone. In addition many US gamers had come to expect backwards compatibility from console developers (as was the case with the Atari 2600 and 7800), but the SNES was not designed to play NES cartridges.

Rivalry between Nintendo and Sega produced what is possibly the most notorious console war in gaming history. Nintendo would never achieve market leadership in Europe and did not manage to do so in the U.S. until 1994, benefiting from Sega's pulling out of the market and its continued production of SNES and its games well after the 32-bit era of gaming had started.

In the period of the early 1990s, a blue-collar anti-Japanese sentiment had grown to maturity. While the NES was accused of shoddy construction and poor planning, the SNES was rumored to be a tool of outright economic war. The SNES was incompatible with several American-brand TVs, causing the screen to hop 3-5 times a second, or (in very rare cases) even outright backfire on the TV set. Nintendo fixed all units aftermarket free of charge, but the theory held on for years.

By 1996, the 16-bit era of gaming had ended, and a new generation of consoles, including Nintendo's own Nintendo 64, caused the popularity of the SNES to wane. In October 1997, Nintendo released a redesigned SNES 2 in North America for $99 USD (which included the pack-in game Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island). Like the earlier NES 2, the new model was designed to be slimmer and lighter than its predecessor but lacked S-Video and RGB output, and would prove to be among the last major SNES-related releases in America. A similar redesigned Super Famicom Jr. was released in Japan around the same time. All the American cases from the original NES to the SNES 2 were designed by Lance Barr.

Nintendo of America ceased production of the SNES in 1999. In Japan, the Super Famicom continued to be produced until September 2003 (also some new games were produced until the year 2000). In recent years, many SNES titles have been ported to the handheld Game Boy Advance, which has similar video capabilities. Some video game critics consider the SNES era "the golden age of video games," citing the many groundbreaking games and classics made for the system, whereas others question this romanticism. See video game player for more.

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Game Boy

The Game Boy line (Japanese: ¥²©`¥à¥Ü©`¥¤ G¨¥mu B¨­i) is a line of battery-powered handheld game consoles sold by Nintendo. It is one of the world's best-selling game system line, selling over 120 million units worldwide as of 2006 and has spawned many successful spin-offs. It is also the best-selling portable game system line ever, and the longest runner.

History
Nintendo's Game Boy handheld was first released in 1989. The gaming device was the brainchild of long-time Nintendo employee Gunpei Yokoi, who was the person behind the Ultra Hand, an expanding arm toy created and produced by Nintendo in 1970, long before Nintendo would enter the video game market. Yokoi was also responsible for the Game & Watch series of handhelds when Nintendo made the move from toys to video games.

When Gunpei designed the original Game Boy, he knew that, to be successful, the system needed to be small, light, inexpensive, and durable, as well as have a varied, recognizable library of games upon its release. By following this simple mantra, the Game Boy line managed to gain a vast following despite technically superior alternatives.

Game Boy continues its success to this day and many at Nintendo have dedicated the handheld in Yokoi's memory. Game Boy celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2004, which nearly coincided with the 20-year anniversary to the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). To celebrate, Nintendo released the Classic NES Series and a NES-themed color scheme for the Game Boy Advance SP.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had this to say on the rumored demise of the Game Boy brand: "No, it's not true after all. What we are repeatedly saying is that for whichever platform, we are always conducting research and development for the new system, be it the Game Boy, or new console or whatever. And what we just told the reporter was that in thinking about the current situation where we are enjoying great sales with the DS and that we are now trying to launch the Wii, it's unthinkable for us to launch any new platform for the handheld system, including the new version of the GBA... Perhaps they misunderstood a part of this story, but as far as the handheld market is concerned [right now] we really want to focus on more sales of the DS; that's all."

Versions
The Game Boy console went through several design iterations, without significant changes to its computing power, since its release in 1989.

Game Boy
The original Game Boy was released on April 21, 1989 in Japan and in August 1989 in the United States with an MSRP of US$100. Based around a Z80 processor, it had a black and green reflective LCD screen, an eight-way directional pad, two action buttons, and Start and Select buttons. It played games from ROM-based media contained in small plastic detachable units called cartridges (sometimes abbreviated as carts or GamePaks).

The killer game that pushed the Game Boy into the upper reaches of success was Tetris. Tetris was widely popular, and on the handheld format could be played anywhere. It came packaged with the Game Boy, and broadened its reach; adults and kids alike were buying Game Boys in order to play Tetris. Releasing Tetris on the Game Boy was selected as #4 on GameSpy's 25 Smartest Moments in Gaming: Tetris Makes Game Boy a Must-Have.

The original Game Boy was the first cartridge-based system that supported more than four players at one time (via the link port). In fact, it has been shown that the system could support 16 simultaneous players at once. However, this feature was only supported in Faceball 2000.

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Nintendo Gamecube

The Nintendo GameCube (Japanese: ¥²©`¥à¥­¥å©`¥Ö; originally code-named Dolphin during development; officially abbreviated as GCN by Nintendo of America) is Nintendo's fourth home video game console, belonging to the Sixth generation era¡ªthe same generation as Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's PlayStation 2, and Microsoft's Xbox. The GameCube itself is the most compact and least expensive of the sixth generation era consoles. The GameCube was released on September 14, 2001 in Japan; November 18, 2001 in North America at $199.95 USD [2]; May 3, 2002 in Europe; and May 17, 2002 in Australia.

The GameCube was first introduced in volume #145 of Nintendo Power magazine. Luigi's Mansion was the first cover game (volume #150).

The GameCube was unveiled during Spaceworld 2000. Physically shaped similar to a geometric cube, the outside casing of the Nintendo GameCube comes in a variety of colors, such as indigo, platinum, and black (also a limited edition Resident Evil 4 platinum and black game console). In Japan, the system is also available in orange (known there as Spice, like the orange controllers), or in limited edition colors like Crystal White, Mint Green, Copper, and White with black pinstripes.

The Nintendo GameCube uses a unique storage medium, the GameCube Optical Disc, a proprietary format based on Matsushita's optical-disc technology; the discs are approximately 8 centimeters (3 1/8 inches) in diameter (considerably smaller than the 12 cm CDs or DVDs used in competitors' consoles), and the discs have a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigabytes. Contrary to popular belief, GameCube discs are not physically read any differently from a standard DVD disc, but are encrypted and contain a 'barcode' unreadable by most DVD drives. This move was mainly intended to prevent piracy of GCN titles, but like most anti-piracy technology, it was eventually cracked. By exploiting a flaw in Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II, users were able to connect their GameCubes to their PCs and run homebrew programming on the console. [3]. Later, a special debug mode in the GameCube drive was discovered which allowed the console to read and play from standard mini DVD-Rs.

The Nintendo GameCube does not have any DVD-movie support. Common reasons cited by Nintendo for using this format are to lower piracy, provide faster loading times, and to make the system cheaper (to avoid DVD-licensing fees) and more compact. The lack of DVD movie support was also a double-edged sword; it did not appeal to the mass audience that turned to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox due to their built-in DVD support. Also, a number of later games that had excessive amounts of audio or video would be scaled down when ported to the Gamecube. An example of this is Def Jam: Fight For New York, where the GameCube version did not feature as many audio tracks as its PS2 or Xbox counterparts, and players were not given a choice to customize their character's voice on the GameCube version as they were on the Xbox and PS2. Despite the protection of a non-standard disc format (essentially a miniature DVD-ROM with non-standard sectors and filesystem formatting), a number of modchips such as the Qoob and ViperGC have been released that, when used in conjunction with a modified bios, allow the use of a standard or 8 cm DVD-R to load backed-up, homebrew, boot-leg or pirate software. There was also a DVD-capable variant released by Panasonic in Japan, under license from Nintendo. Called the Q, it was a modified GameCube that could also hold standard-sized DVD discs and play back both formats. However, it was never released outside Japan and production ceased in December 2003. The Q's different footprint also left it incompatible with the Game Boy Player.

The GameCube system also has the unique capability to connect to Nintendo's portable system Game Boy Advance and SP. The system does not link to the Micro due to the fact that its slot is too small. Such a connection between the two systems allows the transfer of game data. Examples of this functionality include the use of the Game Boy Advance as a controller for the game played. Subsequent information related to game play may be displayed on the Game Boy Advance's color screen for added convenience or to avoid the cluttering of the display on the television screen. This functionality has also been used to unlock "secrets" such as new levels or characters when two games, a Game Boy Advance game and its GameCube equivalent, are connected together. Up to four Game Boy Advance systems can be connected to the GameCube through the GameCube's four controller ports for multiplayer play. A special Nintendo GameCube to Game Boy Advance connection cable is required for each Game Boy Advance system that is to be connected to the GameCube. A fair variety of GameCube games implement this innovative functionality, while Nintendo encourages its continued use.

The GameCube was designed for ease of portability, with its small size complemented by a carrying handle. However, this feature over other consoles was minimal since its inexpensive production and selling price were its main advantages. Interestingly, with the addition of the Game Boy Player accessory, the GameCube becomes a nearly perfect geometric cube. Despite being more compact than the PlayStation 2 (it was released over a year later and kept the power supply separate from the console), the GameCube has superior graphics processing power and better ProLogic sound, but no optical output. The GameCube also has a menu system with memory card data, sound setting and a calendar. The menu system can be accessed by starting the GameCube with no game loaded or holding down the "A" button while the GameCube boots.

The controller has the traditional directional pad, two thumbsticks, and eight buttons: A, B, X, Y, Z, L, R, and start/pause. Keeping up with the Nintendo 64, it features no select button, but the C buttons have been replaced by an analog C stick, instead. The thumbsticks do not have added "clickable" button functionality¡ªunlike other such consoles of the era¡ªbut both L and R shoulder buttons are analog, being able to detect pressure applied to them before "clicking," essentially doubling their functionality.

The GameCube had a network adapter released during the holiday season of 2002, but Nintendo did not promote or support online gaming anywhere as heavily as Sony or Microsoft. The only high profile title that required the adapter was Sega's Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II. Instead, Nintendo focused more on Game Boy connectivity. Two separate adaptors were made, one for dial-up phone lines and one for broadband connections.

The GameCube has some hidden tricks included in its startup sequence: holding the "Z" Button while the system boots will replace the normal xylophone musical sequence with squeaks, followed at the end by a child laughing. If you have four controllers plugged in and hold the "Z" button on all of them, you will hear sounds of a Japanese-style drum sequence ending with a traditional Japanese gong.

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