Cult Classics: GameCube
Part 1: Animals, drums, war and tidying.
Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest
- Developer: Saru Brunei
- Release: 2002 (Never in Europe)
This is the very definition of a cult classic - a completely bizarre, conceptual, mildly unsettling nonsense of a game whose conceptual strangeness gives it value far, far beyond that of its actual gameplay mechanics. It's the closest thing the GameCube has to Spacestation Silicon Valley - a completely weird, cheerily violent game about evolution and the concept of survival of the fittest, in which you eat, mate and die over and over in a constant quest for self-improvement. It's like a cubist Spore, stripping games (life, even) down to a bare, minimalist graphical and gameplay template. You're constantly working towards betterment, eating colour-coded limbs from other defeated animals in order to mutate, all to a backdrop of equally minimalist, occasionally discordant piano music. It's one of the best things on the GameCube from a cult collector's point of view, peppered with flares of creativity, like the odd poetry that makes up most of the game's text and the 150 different slithering, crawling, striding, scuttling animal mutations with their imaginatively descriptive names ('Mullet', 'Squirtgun', 'Pillowless'), all of them made from nothing more than cubes and tiles. Thanks to a weird publishing agreement with Atlus, Nintendo never allowed Cubivore to be released in Europe, but that's no bother now. Find it on eBay, and be glad you did - as games go, this is probably a surrealist masterpiece.
What we said: Nope, never reviewed. Death to us.
Doshin the Giant
- Developer: Param
- Release: 2002 (Never in the US)
And where the Americans got Cubivore, we got Doshin the Giant - another niche game resurrected from the 64DD, and another with more value as a curiosity piece than as a gaming classic. But that's what we're here for. 'Be a giant, do what you want' was Doshin's slogan, and it did rather well at that, in its own little way. Pottering around an island, helping out tiny human cultures whilst making mountains, adjusting sea levels and stomping down ground to make a pretty valley is really very relaxing - although it is a bit unfortunate that most landscaping activities make Doshin look like he's humping the earth with his belly-button. Doshin is a lovely little game about freedom and scenery. It feels very tactile, very personal; it's a quiet and calming experience, something to play on a Sunday morning. It's an easily exploitable game, full of little errors, but it can still be lovely to play.
Eurogamer said: Nothing! Nothing at all. We were probably too busy reviewing ICO over and over again. Idiots.
Donkey Kongas 1, 2 and 3
- Developer: Namco
- Release: 2004, 2005 and 2005 respectively (the latter Japan-only - originally we put "1005", impressively)
A silly, ridiculous peripheral! Terrible, un-licensed cheesy cover versions of well-known pop hits! Techno remixes of classical music! An appalling tropical brass-band remix of the Zelda theme! Donkey Konga had it all, and though it was hugely successful in Japan, the West never really cottoned on to its charm. Proper rhythm-action aficionados won't have any problems at all with this game, as even the hardest of its settings can be mastered within a weekend, but Donkey Konga isn't for aficionados - it's for anyone with a stroke of silly in them, anyone who wants to feel like a great big monkey clapping and drumming along to Chumbawamba on a set of ludicrous plastic bongos. It's pretty good in multiplayer, too. Everyone loves a bit of cheesy nonsense now and again.
What we said: "We appreciate the simplicity of the idea, but in the absence of the hidden depths we normally expect from this sort of game it ultimately wears thin far too quickly."
Look out for part 2 of our Cube Cult Classics roundup, in which Keza loses it completely and starts advocating frog golf, cows and psychedelic ostracism simulators.