Obscusion B-List: Bizarrely Late GameCube Ports (& If They Offered Something New, in Return)

The Nintendo GameCube is a video game console that has more or less always had a bit of a reputation ever since it first launched in the last quarter of 2001 (September in Japan, November in North America, & May 2002 for Europe & Australasia), and a decent part of that comes down to what it kind of represented for Nintendo, as a whole. After having an industry dominating presence with the Famicom/NES & then managing to fight off tough competition with the Super Famicom/SNES, the Nintendo 64 suffered a good bit from Nintendo's insistence on sticking with cartridges when everyone else had moved on to optical media, which in turn allowed Sony to take command with the PlayStation. In that sense, the GameCube was Nintendo essentially giving in to peer pressure by finally going with optical media... but, in true Nintendo fashion, the company still showed resistance by going with their own proprietary take on miniDVD. While Nintendo did manage to get third-party support back with the GameCube, including the return of Square(-Enix), the GameCube still wound up being the third-place console of its generation, both in terms of sales (~21.7 million vs. the Xbox's ~24 million) & even game catalog (651 games vs. the Xbox's 989); I won't even bother with the PS2's numbers, because they utterly smoke both competitors.

Thank Evan Amos for such great console images.

However, probably the most bizarre thing about the GameCube is that it also sometimes felt as though the console was treated as a bit of an also ran by the publishers themselves, namely when it came to multi-platform releases. While there were certainly plenty of games where the GameCube port came out more or less at the same time as on the other consoles, maybe no more than a month later, there were seemingly way more examples of games coming out on Nintendo's fourth home video game console literal months after the initial release, if not a year or even more! For some of these releases the same was true for an Xbox or PS2 port, so in those cases it was likely a case of timed exclusivity, which is nothing too shocking. Still, there was a surprising amount of consistency when it came to GameCube ports coming out notably later than almost anything else, which in turn made it feel like Nintendo's console truly was the also ran of the lot, where those who decided to go with the GameCube over the PS2 or Xbox were seemingly punished by having to wait longer for certain games, while their friends who sided elsewhere were rewarded with games first (& more games, overall).

So, in this 25th Anniversary year of the GameCube's launch, let's go over some of these games that wound up coming to the GameCube way, way, waaaaaaay later than other consoles... and see if GameCube owners at least received something special for their patience.

I must admit, some of the entries I came up with are a bit odd &, really, if it weren't for the fact that they were bizarrely late arrivals to the GameCube then some of them wouldn't really be brought up by most nowadays. Case in point is out first entry, 4x4 Evo 2. Originally released for PC & the Sega Dreamcast in October 2000, the first 4x4 Evo(lution) was an off-road racing game developed by a pre-BloodRayne Terminal Reality & could maybe be seen as a spiritual successor to its two Monster Truck Madness games, with the titular monster trucks instead replaced by more standard licensed 4x4 trucks. 4x4 Evo was most notable for being one of the first examples of true cross-platform online play, as owners of the Windows, Mac, & Dreamcast versions could all race against each other, as well as download each others' custom race tracks, & in fact the game's online play is still available to this day, even on Dreamcast. The game would later receive a PS2 port in early 2001, but that version featured no online play whatsoever.