Last week I finally broke down and bought a Nintendo GameCube. I’ve wanted to play Metroid Prime for a long time, and finally broke and bought the system. At the same time, I got a WaveBird wireless controlled, the 251 Memory card (it’s the larger one), Metroid Prime, and Super Mario Brothers Smash Brothers Melee. Best Buy had a deal going where if you bought two GC games, you got $25 off.

The last few nights, even though work has been busy and basketball season is well underway, I’ve tried to squeeze in as much Metroid game play as possible. SMBSBM hadn’t even been cracked out of the plastic until this weekend, when Tedd came into down to celebrate Josh’s birthday. As soon as we started playing it, I realized two controllers is not near enough. The game would be much better with all four players active … next time the boys are in town, I’ll have to fix that.

The system is pretty smooth, and the games really nice looking. Metroid is large, and it’s different to play the game in 3D. I like the scanning mode, where you can get information in the game about your opponents/enemies, your environment, and specialties in the levels/areas. The game is very dexteral — to do some things, you need to press 3-4 buttons and move a directional toggle. That took a few days to get the hang of, but the game is classic Metroid — a fun, challenging mix of shoot-em-up bang-bang with map, item, and puzzle solving. I like it. And I’m still learning Smash Brothers Melee, but that’s a lot of fun too.

While Tony and Tedd and Eric were playing Smash Brothers, I was looking around Amazon.com for GameCube releated shopping lists, I saw the new Zelda game “The Wind Waker” is available for pre-order, shipping in late March. They have a promotion running right now on Amazon where if you order Wind Waker, they’ll throw in Ocarina of Time/Master Edition (for GameCube - they ported it, and added a ‘hard mode’) for free ($70 value) when it’s released next month. I had an Amazon.com gift certificate to spend, so $33 later I’m getting both games.

I hope Zelda comes with a gold disc.