I've owned a Gamecube since launch day (actually, I've owned two since one of them got hit by lightning), and while not exactly a family setting (me and my wife mostly play with our friends. No kids yet), the Gamecube has destroyed the competition every single time. We've had people bring over X-Boxes and the like only to forget about them and play the Gamecube. Likewise, the GC gets picked over the PS2 for multiplayer games 9.9 out of 10 times. I honestly only recall playing a multiplayer game on the PS2 once at any point that we had the Gamecube available too. That's once out of like every weekend over the last 4 and a half years.
For single player games, you can sure argue the PS2 is better. But if you're into multiplayer gaming (family and friends and the like I mean, not sitting alone playing other people online), then the Gamecube is your best bet.
Of course, I'm assuming that GP means family multiplayer by family friendly and not games like Chibi-Robo (which, while great, isn't that appealing to me. I don't play single-player games almost at all).
For the GP, if you end up going with a Gamecube, here are some recommendations:
Multiplayer: - Super Smash Bros. Melee - WarioWare Inc. - Mario Kart DD - One of the Mario Party games - Pacman VS (you have to shell out for a GBA for this one, but it is one of the funnest console games I've ever played. Its also the only console game my dad's ever played and not only did he enjoy it, but he whooped us all). - Zelda 4 Sword (you gotta shell out for as many GBAs as players for this one. However, its even funner than Pacman VS. One of the best multiplayer games ever made, IMO). - Final Fantasy CC (GBAs again, one per player. Pretty fun, but not as fun as the Pacman VS and Zelda 4 Sword unless you're hardcore into RPGs I guess). - F-Zero GX - Super Mario Strikers (don't actually have this game, but I love it when I get to play it) - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series
And those are just the ones I play on a regular basis. I have yet to check out Star Fox Assault, Metroid Prime Echoes, and a few others (Mario Tennis, etc). I have a nagging feeling that I'm forgetting some games, but such is life. (also note, of all those games, all but TMNT are GC exclusives)
The single-player-games-that-I've-played list is much shorter. I play almost no single-player games at all. But here it is:
- Pikmin & Pikmin 2 (you can actually unlock a 2-player mode in Pikmin 2) - Zelda Wind Waker - Super Mario Sunshine (one of my favorite platformers of all time. Amazing game) - Phantasy Star Online (I don't actually play this. I just use it to boot up Linux on my gamecube. It also has a multiplayer mode that I haven't tried out much). - Harvest Moon: AWL and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody (both killer games for their own reasons. Nothing quite as relaxing as farming..) - Metroid Prime - Starfox Adventures (I personally hate this one because its so different from what Starfox should be IMO, but my little brother-in-law seems to love it)
There are a lot of single-player games that I just don't like, so I don't get them too often at all. For single-player family games, the PS2 could very well have more games, but the ones on the GC are simply amazing. Nintendo makes some of the best games out there, simply can't be beat as a non-internet multiplayer system, and has one hell of a killer lineup of single-player games as well.
This was somewhat longer than I intended. I'll use it to reffer other people to when they're curious maybe:-)
Although you could also say: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you lose your monopoly. Maybe its for the better for us techies if the masses aren't "Computer Literate"?
I don't really think that. Having people know at least the 'basics' would make life a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people, but it would also put a few computer security personell out of jobs.
If I was the only person in the world producing bubble gum, I could a) make my bubble gum taste like shit and b) charge a billion dollars a stick. Now, people could stop using bubble gum, but people can't really stop buying graphics chips. Graphics chips are kinda necessary for games.
It sounds like they are going to run every sound through this garbling equation and then develop signatures of the garbled sound of a doritos commercial. So they won't ever have to touch the actual ungarbled sound.
Of course, I still don't trust them and still think this is a terrible terrible idea.
Yeah, I mentioned that too. But wine isn't anywhere near as universal as dosbox or pretty much any emulator. Much better than nothing, but still not quite there. For example, while the single-player mode of the Windows version of Lords of the Realm II works great in Wine, the multiplayer version doesn't even come close. Without the multiplayer, you might as well play the dos version (dosbox is much easier to live with than wine).
After typing that paragraph, I spent an hour messing with Lords of the Realm II and wine and have gotten it pretty far along the way to playing multiplayer. The process involved hacking windows dlls into wine one by one (a lot of which came from directx 7.0 which I got from oldversion.com) and a few dlls from my windows install. In the end, I managed to host a server (using TCP even). I had to test with two Lords2 instances running on my laptop, since there's nothing else available at the moment, and that didn't go over so well. Dunno if that's because of faulty emulation or because of the two sessions.
Compare that to the process of playing multiplayer MOO2 in dosbox, which consisted of one party running ipxnet startserver and the others running ipxnet connect 10.0.0.2 and then starting up MOO2 and everything working perfectly.
Its cool that it works after getting it to work, but it could get better. I'm very excited that I got it going at all, though, and am gonna try to convince my wife to play Lords2 after work today! Thanks for giving me the drive to do so:-)
It didn't occur to me to try a scratch remover. I never really believed those things worked. I have some scratched CDs as well, maybe its time to invest in one...
This was originally a debate over whether the PS3's or the Revolution's backwards-compatibility is better, I think. In that regard, this would move to even out the playing field. I still think Nintendo's ahead in the quality of the downloadable content they're gonna have. The only non-Nintendo console games I personally remember every playing were Star Ocean 2 and Street Fighter 3 (I think it was 3). Of course, the only Nintendo games a good friend of mine remembers playing are Super Smash Bros and Kingdom Hearts, so that argument can go both ways. For my purposes, the Revolution's backwards compatibility is much better. I am what the industry now apparently reffers to as a "Casual Gamer", which is to say I grew up playing games 5 or 6 hours a day every day for most of my life, and continue to do so (well, ok, 2 hours average for me now. Married life is hard to balance with gaming, even when the spouse is a gamer), but since I don't buy every FPS and sports title that comes out and instead spend that amount of time, effort, and money on games like Super Smash Brothers, Mario Sunshine, and Wario Ware, I somehow no longer deserve the title "hardcore".
The wife's more pissed off about this than I am, cause though the early part of my life was spent in Russia with little access to hardware and games (although I did manage to get access to some games on the mainframe of the university my mom worked at, and later got a Nintendo Game & Watch game), she was playing the Atari soon after learning how to walk, and suddenly she's a casual gamer.
Its weird how game compatibility goes. We can run almost everything made on things like Commodores and such (various emulators for everything), and with the latest release of dosbox, we can run almost all the DOS and a lot of the Win3.1 (not that there were that many) games. Its the stuff between that and Win2k that's iffy.
It almost seems like there's this hole that's a lack of support, and its shrinking from the tail end while eating up a bigger and bigger time period. Not sure if its expanding faster than its shrinking, but its rather interesting. I think with Vista's release, a lot of older but still-playable games (late 98 era) will become unplayable, and at the same time Wine will keep getting better and will be able to play the oldest games unplayable now (95-era and such).
On a different note, software like dosbox and the like seems to go partway toward nullifying the argument for open-sourcing games. I mean, games that were open sourced (Gladiator, Rise of the Triad, the Dooms and Quakes, etc) do live on today on modern systems, but the games that weren't are still very much alive and playable. In facts, Dosbox's enhancements like modem and IPX emulation make those games better and better! Of course, no matter how good Dosbox gets, it still won't be able to make, for example, the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe be anywhere near as good as OpenTTD, but its still cool how they improve well after their support life-cycle is over.
I kinda lost my point in all that, or maybe disproved it or never had one to begin with, but its still interesting. Maybe a bit off-topic, too....
Tiptoe around the corner, sneakily climb the nearest wall, and then BAM, drop on the Goomba's head out of nowhere, taking it out and at the same time creating a human (mushroom?) shield for yourself against the spiked hammer of the nearby Spiky-Hammery-Bastards from Mario Bros (3?).
The big library of (mostly less-than-mediocre) PS1 and PS2 games might be playable on the PS3, but will you be able to get them? Even if you own a good amount, the games scratch and die after a few years. Me and my old room mate were going through his PS1 collection trying to find a decently unscratched disk. Turns out about 80% of the legal portion of his collection is scratched to hell. Only games that survive are burns, which you'd probly need a mod chip to play on your PS3. And, when your legal games die, how are you gonna get more? Bookmans, EB, etc, might have some, but if you're looking for one specific game, your only choice is eBay oftentimes, and even that's hit and miss.
Is that a better situation than Nintendo, where a portion of the games will be available, but easily so? It might be or it might not, depending on your resourcefulness and the actual conditions out there. I haven't tried to hunt down any console games, really. I just collect old DOS games.
My first laptop (not that long ago. This was early 2003) had a 700 meg hard drive. I think that's somewhere around the amount of flash they're putting on this thing (wiki article says between 512 megs and a gig). I had a very workable install of Debian in 300 megs (X, IM, web, programming, a few games), and had the other 400 megs to play around with. This was my main laptop and I pretty much used it for most things. Only things it couldn't do that my laptop could was speedy compilations and non-simple games. Granted, the latter is a big thing in the US, but in developing countries, if that's your only option for computing, you'll happily play simple games if you must.
The rest of my laptop's specs were inferior to this thing (with the exception of the screen). It had 16 megs of ram and a P90 (IIRC). 90mhz with 16 megs of ram isn't flashy, but it was very usable. The 100$ laptop has 128 megs of ram. That's like perfection.
Just passively listening to traffic of a wireless network, you can get the MAC addresses of the clients participating. Then you can use a utility such as macchanger to change your MAC to their MAC, and if its a simple system like WEP I think you'd easily be able to get onto the network even if they're on the network still. A whitelist doesn't really work as well as people sometimes assume it will, and the costs of your solution involve two networks.
Of course, if Nintendo only needs access to their own servers, then you could probably just get their dongle thingy and run it. Its probably cheaper than a good WAP.
Alright, "You don't need wireless security because anything you'd need security for should be done over the wire" is just dumb. WPA is a decent enough standard to use for transmitting critical data over wireless. Its better than WEP. No matter how good my bank's fraud prevention is, I'd rather hold on to my credit card number. Plus, there's the whole issue of random people hopping on your wireless with no security or even WEP (especially if you're pushing enough packets for someone to guess your key quickly). As for range, I assure you that wireless signals don't stop at the walls of an even moderately-sized house. Drive down your neighborhood sometime. Its pretty easy to pick up a few networks.
If anything, the flaw with WPA is that it might not be secure enough, but unless my wife starts suddenly letting me string cables across the house at will, WPA will have to do. All the really importants stuff goes through SSL anyways (https, scp, gaim-encryption) cause no matter how well you secure your network, for all you know your ISP might be beaming your packets across the entire town.
And why can't a server be on wireless? I mean sure, depends on what you're serving. Personally, I stream movies from my MythTV box over wireless just fine. And you don't even need anywhere near that much bandwidth for serving emails or web sites.
I love Nintendo and am a huge Nintendo fanboy. I agree that Nintendo is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for a huge portion of our gaming experience today. The only current-gen console I have is the Gamecube and the only next-gen console I'll have will be the Revolution.
So, I love Nintendo, but statements like yours are kinda disappointing. I mean sure, the Wavebird (a controller that I love) was the first reliable wireless controller, but it didn't actually come up with something new. I mean, you could also say that the Wavebird was the first first-party wireless controller (was it?), or that XBox 360 controller was the first white, wireless controller (disclaimer: I haven't seen one). I'm of the opinion that Nintendo didn't really come up with anything new controller-wise for the Gamecube (at least not until the bongo drums came out). Lots of people bought the N64 for the analog stick and Z trigger and the like. I doubt lots of people bought the gamecube cause the Wavebird was wireless.
Let me take that back, actually. The GBA hookups were brilliant (if not a bit greedy, money-wise). Pacman VS is one of the funnest games I have played with a group of friends. Heck, my dad likes the game and he's never played a computer game (not even Pacman) in his life. It still impressed him. Granted, the Dreamcast had its VMUs, so even this accomplishment can be argued against as an original innovation, but I never saw the VMU as a viable gaming extention. It had an extremely low-resolution screen and I've mostly seen it used for splash-screens before games. Of course, it had the advantage of not replacing the controller (like the GBA hookup does) but extending it.
So, if we're gonna argue that Nintendo is innovative, controller-wise, in this generation, we should at least point to the GBA or the bongo drums or microphone, not at the fact that the Wavebird is more reliable than Mad-Catz wireless offerings were (I mean come on, anything Mad-Catz lasts almost no time at all. That's not a new development).
As an unrelated sidenote, I do have Mad-Catz to thank for having something like 10 spare GC controllers. My brother and I used mostly third-party N64 controllers (cause they were more comfortable), and their failure rate (analog sticks falling off, buttons getting stuck, etc) got it into the heads of all our friends that every time a birthday comes around or something, they should get us new controllers. So now everytime someone brings over a GC to play Mario Kart DD networked and forgets their controllers, its not a disaster by any means.
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I've owned a Gamecube since launch day (actually, I've owned two since one of them got hit by lightning), and while not exactly a family setting (me and my wife mostly play with our friends. No kids yet), the Gamecube has destroyed the competition every single time. We've had people bring over X-Boxes and the like only to forget about them and play the Gamecube. Likewise, the GC gets picked over the PS2 for multiplayer games 9.9 out of 10 times. I honestly only recall playing a multiplayer game on the PS2 once at any point that we had the Gamecube available too. That's once out of like every weekend over the last 4 and a half years.
:-)
For single player games, you can sure argue the PS2 is better. But if you're into multiplayer gaming (family and friends and the like I mean, not sitting alone playing other people online), then the Gamecube is your best bet.
Of course, I'm assuming that GP means family multiplayer by family friendly and not games like Chibi-Robo (which, while great, isn't that appealing to me. I don't play single-player games almost at all).
For the GP, if you end up going with a Gamecube, here are some recommendations:
Multiplayer:
- Super Smash Bros. Melee
- WarioWare Inc.
- Mario Kart DD
- One of the Mario Party games
- Pacman VS (you have to shell out for a GBA for this one, but it is one of the funnest console games I've ever played. Its also the only console game my dad's ever played and not only did he enjoy it, but he whooped us all).
- Zelda 4 Sword (you gotta shell out for as many GBAs as players for this one. However, its even funner than Pacman VS. One of the best multiplayer games ever made, IMO).
- Final Fantasy CC (GBAs again, one per player. Pretty fun, but not as fun as the Pacman VS and Zelda 4 Sword unless you're hardcore into RPGs I guess).
- F-Zero GX
- Super Mario Strikers (don't actually have this game, but I love it when I get to play it)
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series
And those are just the ones I play on a regular basis. I have yet to check out Star Fox Assault, Metroid Prime Echoes, and a few others (Mario Tennis, etc). I have a nagging feeling that I'm forgetting some games, but such is life. (also note, of all those games, all but TMNT are GC exclusives)
The single-player-games-that-I've-played list is much shorter. I play almost no single-player games at all. But here it is:
- Pikmin & Pikmin 2 (you can actually unlock a 2-player mode in Pikmin 2)
- Zelda Wind Waker
- Super Mario Sunshine (one of my favorite platformers of all time. Amazing game)
- Phantasy Star Online (I don't actually play this. I just use it to boot up Linux on my gamecube. It also has a multiplayer mode that I haven't tried out much).
- Harvest Moon: AWL and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody (both killer games for their own reasons. Nothing quite as relaxing as farming..)
- Metroid Prime
- Starfox Adventures (I personally hate this one because its so different from what Starfox should be IMO, but my little brother-in-law seems to love it)
There are a lot of single-player games that I just don't like, so I don't get them too often at all. For single-player family games, the PS2 could very well have more games, but the ones on the GC are simply amazing. Nintendo makes some of the best games out there, simply can't be beat as a non-internet multiplayer system, and has one hell of a killer lineup of single-player games as well.
This was somewhat longer than I intended. I'll use it to reffer other people to when they're curious maybe
Although you could also say: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you lose your monopoly. Maybe its for the better for us techies if the masses aren't "Computer Literate"?
I don't really think that. Having people know at least the 'basics' would make life a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people, but it would also put a few computer security personell out of jobs.
They want all software to be free, of course!
:-)
Oh, and money for autographs
Nintendo For Teh Wiin!
The final secret of the Nintendo Wii's innovative controller is a time machine.
That's how their Virtual Console works, too!
Mayomato and Scott won in the end. It was funny watching them all goof off.
So people can't stop playing games?
Yeah, pretty much.
If I was the only person in the world producing bubble gum, I could a) make my bubble gum taste like shit and b) charge a billion dollars a stick. Now, people could stop using bubble gum, but people can't really stop buying graphics chips. Graphics chips are kinda necessary for games.
Hey now, that's rich to some folks.
Heck, back in my day, we only got a penny for every night spent awake and pot of tea drunk!
If the hat is stolen by a floating baddie, will Indiana Jones slowly lose health?
Photos tend to stick together more than other types of paper, though. It might damage them, so I'd try some photos you don't care about first.
Its also like the "Al Gore invented the internet!" garbage.
It sounds like they are going to run every sound through this garbling equation and then develop signatures of the garbled sound of a doritos commercial. So they won't ever have to touch the actual ungarbled sound.
Of course, I still don't trust them and still think this is a terrible terrible idea.
Yeah, I mentioned that too. But wine isn't anywhere near as universal as dosbox or pretty much any emulator. Much better than nothing, but still not quite there. For example, while the single-player mode of the Windows version of Lords of the Realm II works great in Wine, the multiplayer version doesn't even come close. Without the multiplayer, you might as well play the dos version (dosbox is much easier to live with than wine).
:-)
After typing that paragraph, I spent an hour messing with Lords of the Realm II and wine and have gotten it pretty far along the way to playing multiplayer. The process involved hacking windows dlls into wine one by one (a lot of which came from directx 7.0 which I got from oldversion.com) and a few dlls from my windows install. In the end, I managed to host a server (using TCP even). I had to test with two Lords2 instances running on my laptop, since there's nothing else available at the moment, and that didn't go over so well. Dunno if that's because of faulty emulation or because of the two sessions.
Compare that to the process of playing multiplayer MOO2 in dosbox, which consisted of one party running ipxnet startserver and the others running ipxnet connect 10.0.0.2 and then starting up MOO2 and everything working perfectly.
Its cool that it works after getting it to work, but it could get better. I'm very excited that I got it going at all, though, and am gonna try to convince my wife to play Lords2 after work today! Thanks for giving me the drive to do so
Yeah, its good. Its good enough to have decreased my GPA a decent amount. Now if only I could convert the in-game billions to real money.
It didn't occur to me to try a scratch remover. I never really believed those things worked. I have some scratched CDs as well, maybe its time to invest in one...
This was originally a debate over whether the PS3's or the Revolution's backwards-compatibility is better, I think. In that regard, this would move to even out the playing field. I still think Nintendo's ahead in the quality of the downloadable content they're gonna have. The only non-Nintendo console games I personally remember every playing were Star Ocean 2 and Street Fighter 3 (I think it was 3). Of course, the only Nintendo games a good friend of mine remembers playing are Super Smash Bros and Kingdom Hearts, so that argument can go both ways. For my purposes, the Revolution's backwards compatibility is much better. I am what the industry now apparently reffers to as a "Casual Gamer", which is to say I grew up playing games 5 or 6 hours a day every day for most of my life, and continue to do so (well, ok, 2 hours average for me now. Married life is hard to balance with gaming, even when the spouse is a gamer), but since I don't buy every FPS and sports title that comes out and instead spend that amount of time, effort, and money on games like Super Smash Brothers, Mario Sunshine, and Wario Ware, I somehow no longer deserve the title "hardcore".
The wife's more pissed off about this than I am, cause though the early part of my life was spent in Russia with little access to hardware and games (although I did manage to get access to some games on the mainframe of the university my mom worked at, and later got a Nintendo Game & Watch game), she was playing the Atari soon after learning how to walk, and suddenly she's a casual gamer.
Its weird how game compatibility goes. We can run almost everything made on things like Commodores and such (various emulators for everything), and with the latest release of dosbox, we can run almost all the DOS and a lot of the Win3.1 (not that there were that many) games. Its the stuff between that and Win2k that's iffy.
It almost seems like there's this hole that's a lack of support, and its shrinking from the tail end while eating up a bigger and bigger time period. Not sure if its expanding faster than its shrinking, but its rather interesting. I think with Vista's release, a lot of older but still-playable games (late 98 era) will become unplayable, and at the same time Wine will keep getting better and will be able to play the oldest games unplayable now (95-era and such).
On a different note, software like dosbox and the like seems to go partway toward nullifying the argument for open-sourcing games. I mean, games that were open sourced (Gladiator, Rise of the Triad, the Dooms and Quakes, etc) do live on today on modern systems, but the games that weren't are still very much alive and playable. In facts, Dosbox's enhancements like modem and IPX emulation make those games better and better! Of course, no matter how good Dosbox gets, it still won't be able to make, for example, the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe be anywhere near as good as OpenTTD, but its still cool how they improve well after their support life-cycle is over.
I kinda lost my point in all that, or maybe disproved it or never had one to begin with, but its still interesting. Maybe a bit off-topic, too....
Tiptoe around the corner, sneakily climb the nearest wall, and then BAM, drop on the Goomba's head out of nowhere, taking it out and at the same time creating a human (mushroom?) shield for yourself against the spiked hammer of the nearby Spiky-Hammery-Bastards from Mario Bros (3?).
The big library of (mostly less-than-mediocre) PS1 and PS2 games might be playable on the PS3, but will you be able to get them? Even if you own a good amount, the games scratch and die after a few years. Me and my old room mate were going through his PS1 collection trying to find a decently unscratched disk. Turns out about 80% of the legal portion of his collection is scratched to hell. Only games that survive are burns, which you'd probly need a mod chip to play on your PS3. And, when your legal games die, how are you gonna get more? Bookmans, EB, etc, might have some, but if you're looking for one specific game, your only choice is eBay oftentimes, and even that's hit and miss.
Is that a better situation than Nintendo, where a portion of the games will be available, but easily so? It might be or it might not, depending on your resourcefulness and the actual conditions out there. I haven't tried to hunt down any console games, really. I just collect old DOS games.
Got an ammendment to make here: I couldn't play videos on that laptop either. Music, web, word proccessing, programming worked great, though.
My first laptop (not that long ago. This was early 2003) had a 700 meg hard drive. I think that's somewhere around the amount of flash they're putting on this thing (wiki article says between 512 megs and a gig). I had a very workable install of Debian in 300 megs (X, IM, web, programming, a few games), and had the other 400 megs to play around with. This was my main laptop and I pretty much used it for most things. Only things it couldn't do that my laptop could was speedy compilations and non-simple games. Granted, the latter is a big thing in the US, but in developing countries, if that's your only option for computing, you'll happily play simple games if you must.
The rest of my laptop's specs were inferior to this thing (with the exception of the screen). It had 16 megs of ram and a P90 (IIRC). 90mhz with 16 megs of ram isn't flashy, but it was very usable. The 100$ laptop has 128 megs of ram. That's like perfection.
Just passively listening to traffic of a wireless network, you can get the MAC addresses of the clients participating. Then you can use a utility such as macchanger to change your MAC to their MAC, and if its a simple system like WEP I think you'd easily be able to get onto the network even if they're on the network still. A whitelist doesn't really work as well as people sometimes assume it will, and the costs of your solution involve two networks.
Of course, if Nintendo only needs access to their own servers, then you could probably just get their dongle thingy and run it. Its probably cheaper than a good WAP.
Alright, "You don't need wireless security because anything you'd need security for should be done over the wire" is just dumb. WPA is a decent enough standard to use for transmitting critical data over wireless. Its better than WEP. No matter how good my bank's fraud prevention is, I'd rather hold on to my credit card number. Plus, there's the whole issue of random people hopping on your wireless with no security or even WEP (especially if you're pushing enough packets for someone to guess your key quickly). As for range, I assure you that wireless signals don't stop at the walls of an even moderately-sized house. Drive down your neighborhood sometime. Its pretty easy to pick up a few networks.
If anything, the flaw with WPA is that it might not be secure enough, but unless my wife starts suddenly letting me string cables across the house at will, WPA will have to do. All the really importants stuff goes through SSL anyways (https, scp, gaim-encryption) cause no matter how well you secure your network, for all you know your ISP might be beaming your packets across the entire town.
And why can't a server be on wireless? I mean sure, depends on what you're serving. Personally, I stream movies from my MythTV box over wireless just fine. And you don't even need anywhere near that much bandwidth for serving emails or web sites.
but how many libraries of congress can it store on a football field?
Purple.
I love Nintendo and am a huge Nintendo fanboy. I agree that Nintendo is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for a huge portion of our gaming experience today. The only current-gen console I have is the Gamecube and the only next-gen console I'll have will be the Revolution.
So, I love Nintendo, but statements like yours are kinda disappointing. I mean sure, the Wavebird (a controller that I love) was the first reliable wireless controller, but it didn't actually come up with something new. I mean, you could also say that the Wavebird was the first first-party wireless controller (was it?), or that XBox 360 controller was the first white, wireless controller (disclaimer: I haven't seen one). I'm of the opinion that Nintendo didn't really come up with anything new controller-wise for the Gamecube (at least not until the bongo drums came out). Lots of people bought the N64 for the analog stick and Z trigger and the like. I doubt lots of people bought the gamecube cause the Wavebird was wireless.
Let me take that back, actually. The GBA hookups were brilliant (if not a bit greedy, money-wise). Pacman VS is one of the funnest games I have played with a group of friends. Heck, my dad likes the game and he's never played a computer game (not even Pacman) in his life. It still impressed him. Granted, the Dreamcast had its VMUs, so even this accomplishment can be argued against as an original innovation, but I never saw the VMU as a viable gaming extention. It had an extremely low-resolution screen and I've mostly seen it used for splash-screens before games. Of course, it had the advantage of not replacing the controller (like the GBA hookup does) but extending it.
So, if we're gonna argue that Nintendo is innovative, controller-wise, in this generation, we should at least point to the GBA or the bongo drums or microphone, not at the fact that the Wavebird is more reliable than Mad-Catz wireless offerings were (I mean come on, anything Mad-Catz lasts almost no time at all. That's not a new development).
As an unrelated sidenote, I do have Mad-Catz to thank for having something like 10 spare GC controllers. My brother and I used mostly third-party N64 controllers (cause they were more comfortable), and their failure rate (analog sticks falling off, buttons getting stuck, etc) got it into the heads of all our friends that every time a birthday comes around or something, they should get us new controllers. So now everytime someone brings over a GC to play Mario Kart DD networked and forgets their controllers, its not a disaster by any means.