NGC Magazine Issue 61

Introduction

Issue 61’s main focus was on the release of the Gamecube in Japan and featured the first reviews of the three launch games, Luigi’s Mansion, Wave Race: Blue Storm and Super Monkey Ball. They all got decent scores, with Super Monkey Ball the best of the bunch at 92%, with both Wave Race (91%) and Luigi's Mansion (90%) not far behind. All three of the games were praised for their graphics and the fact they made good use of the Gamecube’s powerful hardware. The only problem they had was that Luigi's mansion simply didn’t have enough replayability, and was relatively short compared to similar games.

The news this month focussed on the Gamecubes Japanese launch, however having only happened 3 days after the September 11th attacks in New York the launch was extremely muted compared to other consoles. There was also the news that Capcom had signed an exclusive deal to publish 6 Resident Evil games on the Gamecube. There were also rumours of Square bringing Final Fantasy games to the Gamecube, showing that big publishers were finally getting back into publishing games for Nintendo. Mark also put some deeper analysis into question as to when Nintendo would finally announce the Gamecubes European launch. Previews this month went into more detail on some of the games shown at Spaceworld last month, such as Soul Calibur 2, Zelda and Pikmin. They also had a special investigation on Resident Evil, as they visited Capcom to take a good look at the remaster of the original game, as well as looking at the other 5 games now destined for Gamecube.

The Game Boy Advance was left to keep the British side going, with Planet Game Boy reviewing 4 new releases. They gave the superb Advance Wars Five Stars, Jurassic Park 3 Park Builder and X Games skateboarding got an average 3 stars, and Xmen cartoon beat em up Reign of Apocalypse only managed 2 stars, mainly due to it being extremely easy, only requiring one button to beat in under an hour. There was also the usual news, previews and tips.

At the back of the magazine, the Gamecube Lab looked at the Gamecube’s user interface, with all the tips and tricks for making your games look and sound the best. The ideas factory investigated what might be in store for us within Mario Sunshine. The second Making of feature looked at Mario 64, and there was also a look at the history of The Legend of Zelda.