Let's Play Every GameCube Game, Part 16
Hot Wheels: Velocity X (Beyond Games/THQ, 2002)
A car combat game, but I only played a mode that challenges you to get to the point the arrow is guiding you to within a time limit. The arrow is useless considering how loopy the track is, and I can't imagine trying to shoot other cars with this layout. Still, it's obviously a kids game, and it seems like it'd be fun enough to make a young one happy.
Hot Wheels: World Race (Climax Brighton/THQ, 2003)
A racing game where you can do stunts to get boost points. There are a decent number of games like this, and it just feels completely by-the-numbers. You don't even get much sense of speed with how bland the backgrounds are and the lack of special effects.
Hudson Selection Vol. 1: Lode Runner (Red Entertainment/Hudson, 2003)
A 3D version of Lode Runner known as Cubic Lode Runner in-game. It's fine, but it doesn't seem like enough to have gotten its own disc in 2003.
Hudson Selection Vol. 2: Star Soldier (Red Entertainment/Hudson, 2003)
A shmup. I like the music, but I really don't like that even the normal enemies take several shots to kill. Honestly, everything in this genre kind of feels like the same game to me.
Hudson Selection Vol. 3: Bonk's Adventure (Red Entertainment/Hudson, 2003)
A 3D remake of Bonk's Adventure that looks horrible and plays just about as badly. There's a really awful flickering effect whenever you take damage or attacking anything. The whole game looks like Yoshi's Island after a long game of graphical telephone.
Hudson Selection Vol. 4: Adventure Island (Red Entertainment/Hudson, 2003)
This strange collection of NES-era remasters closes with Adventure Island, which now has a very low resolution texture in the background that you can even see the seam of. It's a boring game where you walk right forever and throw axes at enemies to avoid dying. If you touch an enemy, you die immediately and have to start over.
Hulk (Radical Entertainment/Vivendi, 2003)
Not to be confused with The Incredible Hulk, this more credible variant is a very, very simple brawler that opens by making you fight the same three soldiers over and over again. There's some mildly fun destructible environment stuff going on, at least, but it wasn't enough to stop me getting bored after about two minutes.
Hunter: The Reckoning (High Voltage Software/Interplay, 2003)
A hack-and-slash game set in the World of Darkness universe which opens by making you fight many clones of the same zombie in an empty, silent train station. They come in groups of two and phase in from nothing whenever one dies, but there was one time when a cutscene triggered showing me saving a civilian in the middle of a fight. I hadn't saved him yet, but this broken mess didn't know that.
I-Ninja (Argonaut Games/Namco, 2003)
Another hack-and-slash, but also a collecathon platformer this time. It plays pretty well and was received decently back then, but it's painfully unfunny and plays obnoxious screaming voice clips at every opportunity. Not one I want to spend more time with.
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (Eurocom/Vivendi, 2006)
A collectathon platformer based on a movie, because of course it is. It actually looks quite nice and runs well, but that can't save it from being the 97 billionth licensed collectathon platformer. I jumped off the edge of the world to find out what happens when you die - you completely restart the level and even get the opening cutscene again. Brilliant!
Ikaruga (Treasure/Atari 2001)
This is considered a classic of the shmup genre and I've actually finished the Steam version, which looks quite a bit better. I can appreciate the uniqueness of changing polarity to avoid certain colors of bullets, but even so it still doesn't overcome my general feeling of this whole genre being the same. It's fine.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (Radical Entertainment/Vivendi, 2005)
Probably the most famous "good" superhero game from this era other than Spiderman 2, it's a sandbox-y destruction game almost in the vein of a Just Cause, except that you're a giant ogre guy instead of a normal sized guy with a hookshot. It still kind of holds up if you can look past the very dated graphics, but since those are kind of the point of a destruction game, I think I'll stick to its more modern successors.
The Incredibles (Heavy Iron Studios/THQ, 2004)
Licensed brawler that presumably eventually has a bunch of playable characters. This first level consisted of fighting hordes of identical Frenchmen holding electric batons, all of whom die in one hit. It's not fun at all.
The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer (Heavy Iron Studios/THQ, 2004)
Unsurprisingly given the small amount of time between this and the last title, it's basically the same game. You can play co-op or switch characters now, so that's cool, but there's still no weight to any of your attacks and they found the most phoned-in performances ever to use for the main cast, so that's less cool. Mercifully, this is the last Disney game for a while.
Intellivision Lives! (Realtime Associates/Crave Entertainment, 2004)
A collection of 60 Intellivision games, including some that never released on the original system. That makes it an early software version of the SNES Mini, basically, but unfortunately almost all the games require two controllers to play. The hub area has a bunch of arcade cabinets representing different genres and an incredibly bad song about Intellivision playing in the background. The area feels uncannily like a puzzle room from an Uchikoshi game, so presumably the player character dies horribly when you stop playing.
The list:
1080° Avalanche
Animal Crossing
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean
Batman: Dark Tomorrow
Burnout 2: Point of Impact
Charinko Hero
Chibi-Robo!
Cocoto Kart Racer
Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest
Custom Robo
Dark Summit
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
F-Zero GX
Family Stadium 2003
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Freedom Fighters
Freekstyle
Gotcha Force