11. Lost Kingdoms – Kane
It’s time to DDDDDDDUEL… sorry, wrong card game
Before they were the household name they are now (Basically before Dark Souls), FromSoftware made some pretty fringe titles built around unique mechanics. Lost Kingdoms was one such title. An RPG with card game mechanics similar in concept to that one Kingdom Hearts game no one played.
You play as Katia, a princess of the Kingdom of Alanjeh in the land of Argwyll. The Kingdom is overrun by a substance known as Black Fog. It consumes life and all signs of civilisation while spawning demons and monsters in its wake. The fog has reached the castle, and your father, King Feobane, has left to try to fight the devastation.
You take up the power of the Runestone, which allows you to use special cards to fight back the monsters that spawn from the fog, and leave on a journey to find your father and save the land. Managing your deck and learning how each card can be used in battle is important to succeed here, as it can be all too easy to get to the boss of the stage with next to no cards left to fight with.
With the signature FromSoft difficulty in effect and interesting mechanics to boot, this is well worth checking out along with its sequel.
12. Ty the Tasmanian Tiger – Riley
Sounds like you’ve got a fair dinkum adventure ahead of you, mate.
The early 2000s were rife with competition for the mascot platformer, and Ty has a well-earned place among the best of the era. Utilising the strengths of its Australian setting (and a snowy mountain for some reason) and wielding different elemental boomerangs, Ty is the quintessential outback experience on the 5th generation of gaming. From lush rainforests, to beautiful coasts and dangerous swamps, the variety they manage to pull from what you’d expect to be a very samey feeling selection of levels is impressive, I just wish the game was longer.
13. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – Kane
“Did I startle you? I suppose that is only natural. As wide as the world is, I am the only boat upon it who can speak the words of men.” — King of Red Lions
Wind Waker was a bit of a pariah at the time of release. Before it was announced, Nintendo released a tech demo showing a dark, gritty scene of a realistically proportioned Link and Ganondorf fighting in a tense duel.
We didn’t get that from Wind Waker, but what we did get was the Zelda game that most embodies that pure feeling of adventure for me. For the first time since the previous game, the setting isn’t Hyrule but the Great Sea, which remains after the Kingdom of old was flooded by the gods. Hyrule lies forgotten under the waves, and the people live on islands dotted across the ocean. Link this time around is a young lad from an island that celebrates the legacy of the Hero of Time.
On your birthday of all days, through dramatic events involving a giant bird and some goofy pirates, your sister is kidnapped from your home, and you set off on a journey to rescue her, still wearing the hero costume sewn by your grandmother.
Your standard Zelda affair is present and accounted for here, complete with dungeons, temples, gadgets and gizmos and more than a few quirky characters all spread across the Great Sea’s unique islands.
For me, this is the most Zelda of them all, with all the conventions and tropes of the series distilled down to their purest forms. The only thing missing is Hyrule itself, but to be quite honest with you, I don’t think I ever missed it during any of my repeated playthroughs. The islands of the Great Sea are more than enough for me.
14. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Riley
Do You Ever Feel A Strange Sadness As Dusk Falls?
Move over Wind Waker, Twilight Princess is the master class of 3D Zelda on the GameCube, and perhaps the entire franchise, depending on who you ask.
It admittedly takes a lot of cues from Ocarina of Time but expands on them massively with some of the biggest and most expansive dungeons in the series to date. The tools and weapons you get are all meaningfully thought out and well utilised within both the dungeon they’re obtained and the overworld to solve puzzles—except maybe the dominion rod.
It contains one of the richest stories in the series to date, with the expected adventurous Zelda shenanigans and a hint of sadness and intrigue. Unencumbered by waggle controls and a fraudulent right-handed Link, but blessed with the content the Wii U version omitted, the GameCube version is by far the best way to experience the game. If you’ve somehow not yet played Twilight Princess, go get your tiny disc ASAP!
15. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures – Riley
A legend begins anew…and a new multiplayer adventure is born!
Four Swords Adventures is a four-player action puzzle game in which four brightly coloured Links work together to solve puzzles, defeat enemies and save Hyrule. It takes cues from The Minish Cap and expands into the perfect multiplayer game for a small group of friends to run through together, helping and hindering each other in hilarious Zelda-based hijinks. It even features a unique story toting both a second incarnation of Ganondorf and the return of Vaati, so the stakes are high! The fact we went through the entire Switch generation and didn’t get a remake or remaster of this game is a damn crime.
16. Luigi’s Mansion – Blaze
Can you survive the night and rescue Mario from the clutches of the menacing King Boo?
Armed with nothing more than a vacuum and his jittery nerves, join Luigi on this spooky adventure uncovering the secrets of his newly won mansion. Meet Professor E. Gadd, a paranormal investigator looking into the mystery of the mansion and the ghosts who inhabit it. With a device dubbed the Poltergeist 3000 he sends Luigi off to, quite literally, clean up the ghosts by vacuuming them up! Look in rattling desk draws and shaking cabinets to solve puzzles and delve deeper into the haunted mansion and find your missing brother.
The game hosts many interesting and ghoulish characters you will have to face off against in stressful fast-paced boss fights with shifting rooms and tricks accompanied by a high-octane soundtrack. Not least of which is our main antagonist King Boo, who hasn’t taken kindly to how he and his Boos have been treated in the past. Need to take a break from ghost hunting? Take some time to sit in the controller config screen; you may hear something familiar.
You get a real unnerving feeling with the music in Luigi’s Mansion; the dark tones and synthetic horror vibes are leagues ahead of the music in his latest outings. All of this craziness isn’t going to rattle Luigi’s resolve as you will catch him humming along to the music occasionally giving a lighter touch to the otherwise dread-filled vibe of the mansion.
17. Super Mario Sunshine – Riley
The vacation starts now!
What do you get when you take immaculate summer vibes on a tropical island with the 3D platforming action of Super Mario 64? That’s right, a water jet pack. Whilst irregular on the surface, Mario’s 3D moveset combined with the course correction and extra mid-air manoeuvrability of a jet pack make this Mario the most versatile he’s ever been (maybe outside of Odyssey anyway).
The game still looks great to this day, and each area of the island feels real and alive. Being able to see other levels in the distance really goes a long way to help it feel like a real place.
The only caveat is that the blue coin quest (24 of the game’s shine sprites) is long and tedious without a guide, and some of the bonus levels can be incredibly frustrating. I’m looking at you, Pachinko machine.
18. Kirby Air Ride – Riley
Everybody’s Super Kirby Racing
The final Kirby game helmed by Masahiro Sakurai, Air Ride is a fast-paced racing game featuring the pink puffball, and coloured variants, riding warp stars and other cooky vehicles across memorable dreamland locales.
Beyond it being a fun racer, the real fun comes from the City Trial mode in which players race frantically around a cityscape collecting items to upgrade their stats before having a series of races to prove who the best is with their newly obtained stats. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Sakurai recreated this concept in Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS as ‘Smash Run’, so you know it’s going to be a fun time!
19. Chibi Robo – Riley
Plug into Adventure!
Probably the weirdest game on the GameCube, you have to play as a tiny robot cleaning a house, managing your power levels and uncovering secrets in a very large world from a very small perspective. Whilst on the surface this may sound relatively simple, the game boasts a strange and surreal style that may be intimidatingly weird to some players at first.
There is a lot of love and charm put into Chibi-Robo, but it is a slow burn you need to allow yourself to enjoy rather than some of the more immediately stimulating games on this list. Plus, you should probably accept that you will never own a retail copy of this game, considering its rarity!
20. Taz Wanted – Riley
Taz is on the loose
A strange beast, Taz Wanted has all the staples of a licensed 3D platformer, but it decides to do something unique and create different sketches spread all over a sandbox-styled area that you need to collect, as well as the usual style of collectables you’d expect. Many of these are collected by dying in certain areas, but some involve baiting enemies to specific locations, knocking an anvil onto something from high up, or other cartoon antics to clear away or unlock a new method of traversal.
If you enjoyed the open-world areas of Crash Tag Team Racing, then this has a very similar vibe and is worth checking out if you’re a Looney Tunes fan.