The GNamer Video Club (Now Showing: CUBE Magazine DVD 19 (2004) )

Howdy all! When I was clearing out my room at my dad's to prepare for moving into my home, I came across a load of old DVDs from various gaming magazines. The majority of these are NGamer DVDs, but I've got a couple of CUBE DVDs and a couple I got through GamesMaster as well. I reckon it'll be a laugh looking back at these early to mid 00s DVDs and seeing what gems we unearth on each of them.

___________________________


Let's firstly start with a promo disc I received in GamesMaster for the original Xbox called "The Difference". It's all about the POWER that Xbox can provide you and features little trailers of upcoming Xbox games along with some promo videos for Xbox Live and other features the big black box would give you.

Here's the front of the packaging:



Apologies about the state of the cardboard sleeve - I was clearly much too eager to know about the RAW POWER of the Xbox and tore into the cardboard with reckless abandon. Here's the reverse:



I did chuckle at the music videos being a big driver to get you to watch the DVD, but I suppose 2002 was an age before YouTube so having Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz with easy access genuinely might have been a worthwhile investment. And to be fair, I genuinely got into Gorillaz thanks to this DVD, so there you go!

Let's get into the meat of the matter then. The DVD takes you from scene to scene of a very bizarre and very early 2000s bit of marketing for the Xbox. It focuses on how Xbox will enhance your senses and indeed, as the reverse of the sleeve stated, will make you see more, hear more and feel more with Xbox compared to its competitors. The DVD stops at different points of this video here  which I managed to find on the director's Vimeo page as it was nowhere to be found on YouTube. You won't get the pauses like you do on the DVD, but you can imagine roughly where it stops - the bit with the young lass by the TVs stops to allow you to "see more" and so on. It's also dubbed with a different music track on Vimeo than on the DVD, which I guess is to do with music rights.  



We're first encouraged to "see more" with Xbox, which almost feels threatening juxtaposed with that horrifying looking child with four eyes. Regardless, clicking on "more graphics power" has the DVD boast about how Xbox has "up to three times more graphical power" than its competitors which is a very oddly worded statement. It talks about the NVidia graphics chip within each Xbox, which I'm sure had 9 year old Jay enthralled. It then treats you to a sizzle reel of some of the Xbox's upcoming titles:



You've got your heavy hitters in there like Halo and Splinter Cell and, er, Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball but there's some games I've genuinely never heard of before like Quantum Redshift and Brute Force. If anyone can shed some light on those games, that'd be much appreciated!

Xbox also wants to talk to you about "more movies", bragging about "the best quality DVD system on any console", which again doesn't make a great amount of sense. I guess the success of the PS2 as a DVD player meant they had to big up the DVD player in the Xbox. We're then subjected to treated to trailers of Die Another Day and Eric Bana's Hulk, which I know have gone down in history as the best Bond movie and best superhero movie respectively. Moving on!



"More Advanced Sound" is all about Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. It's getting exciting folks, I know. The preamble chats about the audio channels and I'll be honest, I started to nod off here, but the DVD delivers a chilling warning that "hearing the footprints of your enemies sneaking up behind you will make you think twice about turning around". You've been warned. We then get to find out a bit more about Brute Force with the following trailer:



You can click on the dials at the side of the video to rewatch it with normal or enhanced audio depending on which you originally selected. It made zero difference.  

"More Music" talks about how you can rip CDs onto your Xbox's hard drive which, to be fair, does sound like a pretty neat idea. Or rather, it would have sounded cool in 2002. The DVD then plays a short video showing some footage from Totally Not Wipeout with a knock-off Prodigy track playing over it and then the same snippet of gameplay with some music composed by Handel, which was actually somewhat amusing. Right, let's move forwards!



The DVD then asks us to "feel more" whilst this pair are necking in the background. I almost feel like the DVD is coming on to me here. Still, moving to "more innovative gameplay" has an exclusive interview for us, an Xbox Live trailer that I still remembered about even prior to firing up the DVD and some chat about the hard drive.

Firstly, the interview and we ha- wait... do you guys hear something?

Wait a minute...



Oh. Hi Pete. The full interview is here for your enjoyment but here are some highlights:

• He talks about how the Xbox hard drive will create worlds "completely unique to the player playing them" and that "every footfall you make will change the world"
  
• He makes a decent point about how you've got all the kit in the box, so you don't need to worry about what graphics card your playerbase is using, which I suppose coming from being a PC developer must have been a relief
  
• He bigs up Halo as what impressed him the most and drew him to Xbox, which I guess is similar to most people's first Xbox experience
  

We then get a Fable trailer, but who cares about that shite when you've got this masterpiece to behold:



"TASTE IT. YEAH!" "Oh, that dookie don't float". "Master of kung-fu, more like master of monkey poo!" The Avengers level assembling of Dark Master's football squad. Iconic moments, one and all. This is a video we should never forget. We should never forget the dark day for Dark Master.

Xbox Live genuinely was a game changer though - easy access to online gaming really made the Xbox the home of online gaming even throughout the 360 days. It's where I had some of my first online gaming moments and I imagine that'll be the same for many of us too.

Lastly in this section, we get a hype reel for the hard drive - it talks about how some of your actions will have repercussions like never before thanks to the hard drive such as smashing a headlamp on a car being something you'll regret when night falls. Clearly this bit of the video was written by Molyneux. This is followed up by a few bits of gameplay from Blinx, Project Gotham Racing and Splinter Cell. Right, let's take this home!



To see us out, we've got some extra features of sorts to peruse. Here is where you'll find those music videos you've been chomping at the bit to get to under the guise of Xbox Presents. Now you can listen to Primal Scream's Miss Lucifer for eternity. Coming Soon has a cavalcade of trailers for upcoming Xbox releases. I won't bother listing them all here, but if you're really interested, there's a full playlist here featuring the trailers along with some of the other videos I've shown off in this post.

And last but not least, we've got the infamous banned Xbox TV spot about life being too short not to enjoy Xbox:



And there we have it! Hope you enjoyed some of those videos - it was a laugh going back through the DVD myself.

Anyone got any Xbox memories to share? Any thoughts on the games shown off on the DVD? Tell me how weirded out you were by the multiple eyed girl. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I'll chuck up a round-up of the next DVD sometime in the near future.

Very enjoyable Jay, thankee-sai.

That must be a big ass bottle of Champagne to be bigger than an OG Xbox.

Wow. That Dark Master advert was... quite something.

This is a top-tier post, Moyles, kudos. Dubious adverts are never going to not be a thing, but how people thought that creepy girl with multiple eyes was going to make people buy an XBox is bewildering. On the other hand, I rather liked the bit of that Rudolph video I saw!

The poor OG Xbox getting fat-shamed again even though it's bigger than the others at the time (still small compared to some systems), it made sense to me due to the POWER! which is true as you can play likes of Soul Calibur II in HD in 2002 and 3rd party games, in general, looking better, online play and the hard drive which meant I didn't have to buy a memory card plus I could rip CD's on to it and my CAW's in WWE games could have a banging entrance theme plus on GTA whilst going through the radio you had a CD player option which was what on the Xbox.

The DVD bit is a tad silly but again the Xbox had the best output options and you could get a better picture out of it, now even though I like my tech and have 4K UHD's which my Xbox One X can play fine that I'm not going out to get an OPPO for a better picture that back then if you had a PS2 doubt you'd be getting an Xbox for that feature.  

On Brute Force, it was great at the time as played system link and the game was squad-based but I played a few years ago when I found it aged really badly which is a shame as I would have said back then it was just a stepdown from Halo.

Quantum Redshift is the Xbox answer to F-Zero/Wipeout and actually hard, took ages to unlock all racers.

Don't knock(ers) Dead or Alive Volleyball, it was actually good I'd go as far as saying better than Beach Spikers, just the ones after went in a different direction.

The OG Xbox is one of my favourite consoles ever, which kinda sounds odd as it's the gen with the GameCube my fav and Dreamcast my second fav. It was a time I guess where I was more sensible with my pocket money to save for a game and have all the systems, would go to mates and have LAN parties, play online and the sheer amount of quality games which I think people forget, how good the exclusives were on the OG Xbox.

Really do think I wouldn't play some games or genres I do now if it wasn't for what I did play on the OG Xbox, going from the PS1 as the main system where it was mainly platformers with the odd other things to the Xbox.  

Anyway top work, Jay and if people want me to talk about some of the great games I can which has a lot of SEGA that you guess why I first got an Xbox Christmas 2002.

I'll properly fire into this (utterly brilliant) thread when I get the chance, but the Dark Master video is indeed a stoater. 

My quick main memories of the OG Xbox: skipping school to play Kung Fu Chaos with pals; getting my first taste of online gaming with Rallisport Challenge (?) in Gamestation on Glasgow's Union Street; thinking Halo was complete wank; really, really wanting Crazy Taxi 3 on GameCube; being blown away with Edinburgh being faithfully recreated in Project Gotham Racing 2; thinking Rare shat the bed with Grabbed By The Ghoulies; and watching with dismay as my best mate traded in his GameCube with loads of amazing first-party games for an XBox with WWF Raw 2.

JayMoyles wrote:

"TASTE IT. YEAH!" "Oh, that dookie don't float". "Master of kung-fu, more like master of monkey poo!" The Avengers level assembling of Dark Master's football squad. Iconic moments, one and all. This is a video we should never forget. We should never forget the dark day for Dark Master.

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. It's like the "bad idea" video from a modern day advert about online behaviour... but written by those guys who come to your school and sit you through an hour-long play about not smoking (do kids still get subjected to that fucking pish!). And Pete's at it again.

I don't think I've actually played an OG XBox. My parents played Halo split-screen in Comet. There you go - my mum's more of an expert on the original XBox than I am. Am I even writing XBox correctly?

No it's Xbox, not XBox

On some of my favourite games you've got 3rd party stuff like Timesplitters 2 with system link etc but could have played that on Cube which I also did or PS2.

That stuff like Ninja Gaiden (I got gud), Dead or Alive 3, Crimson Skies, Halo, Halo 2, PGR 2, Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Buffy, KOTOR, KOTOR 2, Sudeki, Fable, Gun Valkyrie, Otogi, Otogi 2, Crimson Sea, Conker, Dead or Alive Ultimate, Dreathrow, Kingdom Under Fire, Midtown Madness 3, Rallisport Challenge 2, Toejam & Earl 3, Jade Empire, Riddick, Outrun 2 and I could go on

To name a few, ohh and Shenmue II in English

Cheers for the kind words, folks - was a pleasure to put that post together!

Like Jimbob, my exposure to the OG Xbox is minimal at best. The villa my family stayed at during a holiday in Florida had an OG Xbox set up, which me and my brother played in the mornings before heading out to the theme parks. I think it had Star Wars: Battlefront on it, which was neat. But aye, I didn't properly get into the Xbox scene until the 360, so I missed out on all the machine's best games as I was busy with my PS2 and Gamecube during that generation of consoles.

masofdas wrote:

Anyway top work, Jay and if people want me to talk about some of the great games I can which has a lot of SEGA that you guess why I first got an Xbox Christmas 2002.

I'd be down for a wee rundown of the games shown off in that sizzle reel on the DVD if you've played them! I genuinely hadn't heard of some of those games and assumed some of them were cancelled.

The sizzle reel games, how many times will I say Dreamcast or SEGA?

Quantum Redshift, F-Zero/Wipeout clone which was hard from what I remember

Brute Force, doesn't hold up at all in 2020 but was a great squad-based shooter back in the day where the charters had different abilities

Dead or Alive 3, follow up to DOA2 and one of the reasons I got an Xbox because of playing DOA2 on Dreamcast

Panzer Dragoon Orta, I played this last year on Xbox One X as it's BC and enhanced where it still looks great and plays brilliantly shame the series never got as much love as Starfox as it's miles better. Oh and another reason I got an Xbox because this was a Dreamcast game that moved over to Xbox

Halo: Combat Evolved, the game changed FPS on a console which I wasn't bothered about till I played in Virgin Megastore as FPS weren't my thing till this game

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, was actually a good game I'd say better than beach spikers but after this one, the series took a different direction  

Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4, more of the same but on Xbox

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a really good licenced game with the sort of sequel coming to all systems at the time plus this also was Dreamcast game that moved over to Xbox

Moto GP: Ultimate Racing Technology, never played it

Colin McRae Rally 3, like Tony Hawk more of the same on Xbox

SEGA GT 2002, guess what this is another SEGA game which got me interested in the Xbox and I got it with Jet Set Radio Future in a double pack with my Xbox console

Enclave, I did play this but can't remember much about it part from it get an enhanced version on Wii

FIFA World Cup 2002, it's coming home it's coming home footballs coming home ohh wait it didn't

House of the Dead 3, guess what I played House of the Dead 2 on Dreamcast and I saw this on Xbox which made me want one

Toejam and Earl 3, another game planned for Dreamcast moved over to Xbox but this one I have played a dev version of on a DC

Rocky, I thought this was decent when I played but might not be now

Blinx, much like Quantum Redshift MS tried to get a game in genres on the other consoles that this was the mascot platformer at the time. This is backwards compatible but isn't very good now. Does have a bit of a cult following, sort of feels like the Xbox Knack as not very good but people love it, guess why it was made BC

Tao Feng, I remember this being an okay fighter at the time with it being from John Tobias as the selling point.

Splinter Cell, the first game I don't think really holds up but the 3rd Chaos Theory which I played a tad of last year still outstanding and back in the day Spies vs Mercs got a lot of play.

Kung Fu Chaos, basically the Xbox SMASH bros from Ninja Theory who are now back in the Xbox family

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, banger at the time and what I was saying about games back then got me into games now as this was one of the first Western RPG's I would have played to completion. This is BC and enhanced on the One X like all OG Xbox games and it does not hold up from a graphical standpoint but the few missions I did were still fun

Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance, MGS2 but with more content and I liked this but some don't like this version of the game also the sizzle reel has the skateboarding which was exclusive to the PS2 version of Substance

WWE RAW, was not a got wrestling game but was fun playing multiplayer and making CAW's with our own music the second game is the best WWE game on Xbox

James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire, remember when we used to get games like this from EA

That's all the sizzle reel games

Suggestions for Dark Master taglines much appreciated. Mostly because I don't want to have to watch the video again.

masofdas wrote:

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, was actually a good game I'd say better than beach spikers but after this one, the series took a different direction

The airquotes are audible.

"Oh, that dookie don't float" makes me laugh every time I hear it, so that'd be my number one pick.

Quality write-up there Mas, cheers! Regarding MGS2's XBox port, I did chuckle at the fact they included the skateboarding mode as the big selling point in the sizzle reel.

I had to have a move around in one of my draws today to get all my VITA games in, and I've actually got more OG Xbox games then I thought at 35 with a lot being backwards compatible which I do plan to get all of those which I have about 25 still to get, as I can see them going up in price.

One of my most recent buys on OG Xbox is Psychonauts, which might please Jimbob as I've never played it and may get around to it now before the second one comes out. I do also have it on PS4 (PSN) as a PS2 Classic, which would have trophies that I may play it there, got to have a proper look into it as may look better on One X being X enhanced.

GET IT PLAYED ETC. - thanks fully Psychonauts is 100 times funnier than Mr. Online Gaming Guy there.

In a bit (once all the actually interesting videos you guys have got have been shown) I'll direct you to the first video I got to do with games - 1991...

That Dark Master video is hilarious. Did they actually make fictional videogames to market this, instead of real ones? Strange!

I loved the original X-Box despite never being a Halo fan. I was there for the SEGA titles and Rainbow Six 3. Oh and Project Gotham Racing 2, which I recall being one of the first big online titles. Then once Pro Evo 4, Timesplitters Future Perfect and Burnout 3 landed, I was sold on X-Box Live. The original X-Box was a key reason why I went for a 360. Back when everybody said "Hello" and you'd even have a decent conversation with your opponent. Good times.

I think PGR2 was the first game to Xbox Live, I believe also even though not SEGA it was a selling point for me due to MSR.

Thinking about Xbox Live made me remember one of the stupidest and funniest online gaming memories from my early 360 days. Back in high school, Halo 3 custom matches were all the rage and there was quite a big group of us that would play online. One of the guys was desperate to get recognised on a community showcase thing that Bungie put together and had a "genius" idea for a video to upload through the community creations thing built into Halo 3. He wanted us all to change our armour colour to brown and to go to this specific bit of one of the maps which was a narrow muddy tunnel sliding downwards.

Somehow, this was meant to resemble somebody taking a dump with the brown-armoured Spartans meant to resemble the shite and the tunnel... well, you get the drift. He thought this was the best and funniest idea in the world and was confident that Bungie would love it. Nobody else shared his enthusiasm, but we played along for a bit. He wasn't getting the right shot he needed for the pièce de résistance of this magnum opus and he kept asking us to redo the scene. After a while, we just started fucking about, spawning in energy swords and throwing grenades and chucking vehicles down the chute. He was livid. It was brilliant.

I suppose all of that would't have been possible without Xbox Live working as well as it did. I remember PSN not being the best service in its infancy and Nintendo's history with online is dubious at best, but Microsoft seemed to nail online gaming from the get go. It got me playing multiplayer games with some of the folks from back on the NGamer forums. It pretty much got me into fighting games with how much I played SFIV online along with the Xbox Live Arcade version of SFII. I still remember taking all but one guy down in a 5v5 team battle on SFIV and feeling elated as my team-mates cheered me on with every victory. I remember how tense I felt trying to win a game of Search and Destroy as the last man standing against 3 other dudes on COD4 and how my team encouraged me to win the match.

I think part of that online magic has been lost - most folks are bundled up in party chat now (myself included, to be fair) or are using other services like Discord or Skype, so that element of chatting to strangers and having some fun gaming memories is lost. Besides, like gjones alluded to there, I don't think you'd get a decent chat and some good fun out of chatting online in this day and age.

Ha! Yep, every time I've seen a story about playing with randomers recently, it's been about a lack of co-operation at best and abuse at worst/normally.

It's just the way things have naturally evolved, isn't it? You will always have assholes trying to ruin it for everyone else no matter what so rather than folk having to take any type of abuse online they'll just use a forum like this or a discord/twitch community to find like minded people to play games with instead. It's a shame and the biggest loss I can think of is games that might want to integrate stuff such as proximity chat (like The division had) won't happen as often because it is a bit more closed off.

Yep it's now about communities and social media, like a bunch of Stadia news outlets are holding a GRID events, which likely will have people chatting with eachother.

I suppose one of the few online gaming experiences that still encourages speaking to random players would be MMOs. When I jumped back into Runescape about 5 or 6 years ago, I was chatting away to randoms whilst I was levelling up some of the less engaging skills. But, I really can't see myself chatting to randoms in an FPS now - I'd be too worried about toxicity, like Balla and Jas mentioned.

Time for another blast from the past, no?

CUBE DVD 19



CUBE Magazine was a bit of a doomed magazine from the beginning. I know the UK games magazine market was a lot healthier back in the early to mid 2000s, but I don't know if it was healthy enough to warrant three different Nintendo dedicated magazines. As such, I reckon CUBE was a distant third behind NOM and NGC. Still, it had to do something to differentiate itself from the market - no, that something wasn't giving dodgy scores like giving Luigi's Mansion a 7.6 - and that something was having a DVD given away with games footage and interviews. NGamer's DVDs trounced these, by the way, but we're not quite there yet.

I've sadly lost the accompanying magazine that went with this, but fortunately we only care about the video content in this thread. To be fair, it was the video content that made me care about picking up the odd copy of CUBE back in the day. It was through a CUBE DVD that I got my first look at Twilight Princess and found myself hyped as fuck to get my hands on the game. I also got to see Metroid Prime 2 on this very DVD, which you'll get a swatch at later on. There's something to be said for these DVDs, especially in a pre-YouTube and pre-broadband era.

What's really cool is that every one of the videos on this DVD have been preserved on Archive.org, so I can link you to all the videos rather than having to rip the DVD myself. Check out the links as they'll go to the videos themselves for you to peruse. Let's have a gander at what's on this DVD, shall we?



The DVD rockets open with an ad for all the Action Replay related tat you could buy for your humble Gamecube. There are a LOT of ads for various peripherals from Codejunkies on the DVD. I suppose they had to finance the DVD and rake in some extra cash somehow, but a cursory glance at the menus for the DVD highlights just how many ads are on this DVD. They're all presented in a similar way with silly phrases like "bust your Gamecube games wide open", "prepare to unleash the power" and "who says the best things come to those who wait?" Check out some of the links to hear what I'm on about. Here's a comprehensive list:

• Action Replay - The big cheat disc. Give yourself infinite health, unlock everything, shite like that. You know the drill.
  
• Freeloader - Allows import games to be played on your poxy PAL Gamecube without modifying it.
  
  
• Max Memory - A whopping 128MB on a memory card. I'm pretty sure I owned one of these for my PS2, actually.
  
• Advance Game Port - Play GBA games on your telly with this peripheral. Didn't Nintendo release an official add-on for the Cube that did this?
  
• Powerboard - A keyboard for your Gamecube. A hard sell, this one. Unless you played Phantasy Star Online, what was the point? Even the Codejunkies voiceover man was struggling, having to resort to "er, you can input codes on your Action Replay EVEN FASTER!"
  

Did anybody own any of this for their Cube? Did you get any use out of it?



The "meat" of the DVD comes from an extended look at Metroid Prime 2 and Mario Tennis. I'll link you to both the Metroid video and the Mario Tennis video here, but it's not worth watching through in full. As you can see from the picture posted above, this was clearly before capture card technology was readily available for games magazines, so it's the ol' point a camera at the screen deal here. Still, I can imagine this would have been tremendously exciting for folks looking forward to the next Metroid Prime game.



We get a look at GameStars Live! - a convention, by the looks of things. It is incredibly early 00s in presentation. There's a clearly pained lass having to host a Donkey Konga tournament, there's lava lamps and folks getting tribal tattoos to coincide with the launch of the GBA SP Tribal edition, presumably. The clip ends on a painfully long shot of some girls standing waving at the camera. Yep.



Bizarrely, it looks like Nintendo had a presence at Leeds Festival 2004. And by a presence, I mean a van painted with GBA Tribal getup and one Donkey Konga stand. I genuinely can't fathom why CUBE bothered to film a segment here. There's a REALLY awkward bit in the middle of that clip where the camera is focused on two young lads playing on their GBA SPs and there's prolonged eye contact between the boys and the camera and you can tell they're somewhat uncomfortable about being filmed. There's too much slo-mo in this clip. This is a weird DVD.

And... well, here we go.



We've got this lad interviewing a special guest up next. Supposedly, "Big Boy Barry" was a cult TV icon and made regular appearances on the few games TV shows that were on around this time like GamesMaster and Gamesworld. I don't remember him in the least, but maybe some of you do? You'll get an idea for the tone of this upcoming interview with the next image...



Ayup. Here's the interview with Rachel Grant, who was in Die Another Day and was apparently also on Braniac on Sky1, if you remember that show. To be fair to the lad, the intro cards for "Big Boy Barry" and Rachel Grant aren't really indicative of the interview's tone. I was worried we'd get a mocking and pervy tone, but they actually have a good chat about games as she's clearly into her gaming, bigging up Soul Calibur and OoT. It's absolutely dripping with cheese, but it's alright.

Oh, but then we got some closing shots of her squatting over some Joytech peripherals whilst staring sultrily at the camera, so there's that.



Let's take this home. Next up, we've got an interview with one of the lads behind the sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I remember that game being very well received back in the day, so I can understand why this is getting a big interview segment. He's a cheery lad and cracks a big smile when chatting about the story of the game. It's a marketing piece for the game at the end of the day with the developer bigging up the combat and how the game is going to knock our socks off. A shame it didn't end up like that, but alas.



We close out the DVD with a sizzle reel highlighting the future of Nintendo. Was Nintendo's future bright? Let's have a rundown of the games shown in the sizzle reel and their Metacritic score:

• Killer 7 - 74 on Metacritic. Not bad.
  
• Resident Evil 4 - 96 on Metacritic. Aye, did alright for itself that one!
  
• Second Sight - 77 on Metacritic. Not too bad again!
  
• Geist - 66 on Metacritic. Hmm, not too good.
  
• Custom Robo - 65 on Metacritic. Oh dear. Make sure to buy your Freeloader for this, though!
  
• Baten Kaitos - 80 on Metacritic. There we go, we're getting better again.
  
• Mega Man X: Command Mission - 67 on Metacritic, and I could have told you that based solely on the footage in that sizzle reel.
  
• The Incredibles - 63 on Metacritic. No idea why this made it into the bright future bit of Nintendo, but anyway...
  
• FIFA 2005 - 78 on Metacritic. A safe bet, but aren't we still in the era where PES was the far better game?
  
• Need for Speed Underground 2 - 83 on Metacritic. This game was the business.
  
• Goldeneye Rogue Agent - 60 on Metacritic. Oh dear.
  
• Viewtiful Joe 2 - 86 on Metacritic. Yep, good stuff.
  
• The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age - 74 on Metacritic. Deserves better than that, that's a pretty good RPG.
  
• The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures - 86 on Metacritic. Safe bet, Zelda.
  
• Mario Power Tennis - 80 on Metacritic. Known only as "Mario Tennis" at this point, incidentally.
  
• Tales of Symphonia - 86 on Metacritic. Isn't this thought of as the best Tales game, still?
  
• Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat - 80 on Metacritic. Made use of those bongos, if nothing else.
  

And then... one last game...



That trailer is still arguably one of the best trailers in all of video games. I can only think of one of the BotW trailers to rival it, at least off the top of my head. Oh, and a 96 on Metacritic. Although, Twilight Princess is more the Wii's future than the Gamecube's.

And that's your lot! Anyone got any fond memories of any of those games in those sizzle reels? Any ruminations on the content of the DVD itself?

What's great is that Archive.org seems to have a ton of these, so we can easily run through CUBE's catalogue of DVDs in this thread as time goes by.

As I love the Cube this is great and I think I had some of these mags/DVDs of CUBE

I did use a freeloader as I imported Animal Crossing as all the mags said we weren't getting it.

Yeah, you've got the GBA Player which goes on the bottom of the Cube which are expensive now as people would lose the boot-up disc, I've never an unofficial one like that though.

Who needs a powerboard (11 minutes in guys)?


Don't forget Prince of Persia: Warrior Within got an 83, which is rather good score, I'm not a fan myself.

Looking at those games was rather good time on the Cube, and going back the OG Xbox with these games was why have a PS2??? when even the Cube got these 3rd party games and exclusives.

Does remind me I still never owned Killer 7 and Symphonia I would say is still the best maybe Vesperia on a different day.

Now this might be silly question but the vids show the GBA, now I know the mags called CUBE but did they not cover the GBA as well because even though I'm saying the Cube had games I can't see it be enough for a mag.

That's another excellent post, but you're not wrong when you say that this is a bloody weird DVD. I used to get CUBE the odd time, so I've had these DVDs and I know I watched them. I don't remember them being this, well, bad. 

That bit from Leeds Festival 2004 is just offputting, I didn't manage the whole two minutes. I'm not surprised Nintendo were there to be fair, they were at the Reading Festival I went to (2011) too. I don't think anybody filmed me...!

I remember Big Boy Barry! He came back on one of the Digitiser The Show shows in 2018, but he was sadly looking like a sack of shite.

I'm pretty sure I had this dvd myself at one point as well as that main menu looks and sounds very familiar, also isn't that Emily Booth (ye know from Bits) hosting that Donkey konga tournament?

I remember browsing through CUBE in WHSmiths before inevitably buying NGC - you're right about the odd scores on their reviews. I think they gave Wave Race or F-Zero (both fine games) a massive score, that was disproportionate to other reviews at the time. It reminded me of Paragon's Dreamcast Magazine and it was advertised in there in its final issue (along with XBM) - probably took some of their writers too like Chandra Nair.

I don't recall ever seeing a GameCube keyboard, but did have the Freeloader. What a brilliant piece of kit - put the disc in and then remove it, and you could play any region Cube games. Allowed me to pick up Resi 4 in January when it released in the US - still the only game I imported at the time (I did pick up NTSC Cube games in 2008-2009 era, as they were dirt cheap on Ebay). American Cube games had strange boxes that are a bastard to open.