Ahhhhhh, the 'Cube. Man, I loved this thing, and still do. I never had a purple one; I got mine in sexy black, with the GBA Player. Great investment, that was; for an extra fifty bucks I had access to hundreds more games, and I could play them on my TV and not parked directly underneath a high-powered lamp getting eyestrain on a Game Boy. I might've spent almost as much time over the years with the GBA Player as I did with the 'Cube itself.
It always got a ton of crap for being "the kiddie console", and that bugged me then and still does now. The "fun" purple color didn't help, nor did the damn lunchpail handle, nor the fact that Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker came out looking like it did and - despite being a fantastic game - gave "haters" all the ammo they could ever need about Nintendo consoles and games being "nothing but kiddie crap". I mean you could TRY and explain otherwise - I know I did, occasionally - and they'd just throw Wind Waker screenshots at you and mock you. Like "THIS is what you're defending, bro. THIS." Very tiresome. Especially since, even though I was initially one of the people who hated the new art style, I still absolutely loved the game anyway. But anyone who wasn't already "sold" on the 'Cube couldn't be bothered to care. It didn't have GTA3 or Vice City on it; therefore, it was a "kiddie console".
I mean, you still had about 95% of all the OTHER non-exclusive games that you could play on Xbox or PS2, with only a few exceptions. You still had your Mortal Kombat games and your Sonic games and everything else. It's like yeah, Nintendo themselves kept to the same "family-friendly" output that's defined them for decades, but outside of that you had almost the same library as the other consoles. So the whole "Whattya want with a Gamecube? That's not even a real console!" stuff was aggravating.
I will say, That Controller was definitely not ideally-suited to all types of gameplay. But I also never had any problem adapting to it, regardless of what type of games I was playing. That said, I once read it described in a magazine as the "Moon Octopus" controller and that's what I've called it ever since.
Certainly an... unconventional design.
But man, so many great games. MGS: Twin Snakes, Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi's Mansion, Wind Waker, SoulCalibur II, the WWE games... tons and tons of stuff. I confess, for multi-platform stuff I generally went PS2 first, then Xbox, then with the 'Cube I mostly only got the games you couldn't get on the other two. BUT, when my PS2 and Xbox both died, I eventually bought most of those other games on the 'Cube, and I gotta say... it really mattered very little, in the end. Like the graphics on those other consoles were a little bit sharper, which is partly why I preferred buying the multi-platform games on those consoles in the first place... but by this point, I'm grateful just to play those same exact games on a much more stable platform. My Xbox lasted like five years and my PS2 tapped out after about nine, but my 'Cube still works just fine. I love it.
I'm actually long overdue to hook mine up again, since I spent a lot of money the past year picking up a lot of games I missed over the years. My big one I'm missing right now is Code Veronica X; after that there's still a few I'm missing but most of them aren't so crazy rare or expensive. It's still pretty nuts how the market's gone; I paid like $30-40 for stuff I could've had for five bucks as recently as five years ago. But whattyagonnado? MOST of the kinda stuff I'm most interested in, is stuff that's highly unlikely to ever see a rerelease or anything, for multiple reasons. So I'm very glad I still have mine and it's still kicking. Pretty soon I'm gonna hook it up and buzz through a bunch of stuff I never played.
It has a pretty mediocre reputation, but Real Ones Know.