It's been nearly 20 years since Nintendo entered the home gaming market, but we're still here, mashing our buttons day in and day out. Unfortunately, in recent years, Nintendo hasn't been seen by gamers quite as favorably as in those golden years of the 80's and early 90's. In 1995, both Sega and Sony released their next-generation systems with CD-ROM media, but Nintendo, with the perspective that the technology was not yet fully-developed and therefore inadequate for cartridge-like gameplay, stuck to the power of the cart. Unfortunately, gamers and critics alike didn't catch on, and in many ways the N64 was not as successful as it could have been, and drew a lot of loyal fans away from Nintendo.

But today is a day for change. Enter the GameCube, Nintendo's 128-bit gaming machine. Since the late 1980's, companies have been trying desperately to outdo eachother in their consoles' technical prowess, but what makes Nintendo always seem to stand in a league of its own is their games being the emphasis on the systems they build - not the hardware. Unlike rival next generation systems, Sony PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, and Microsoft's X-Box, the GameCube is a solid gaming system, without the pricey addition of a CD or DVD player built in. So instead of releasing an advanced multimedia machine that happens to play games, Nintendo is genuinely trying to improve upon the art of video gaming by publishing games on tiny 8cm optical media discs, allowing for more rotations per minute, thus severely reducing load times, which are still a big setback in disc-based gaming.

Whereas rival developers often try to innovate with crazy new additions to the gameplay that only add to the redundancy a genre already has, Nintendo has gone back a step and changed the way we think of gaming from the ground up, starting of course with the controller itself. Much to critics' discomfort, the GameCube's controller has a brand new button layout, once again breaking the trend that started with the SNES's "diamond" layout. It features the primary A button in the center, almost twice the size of surrounding B, Y, and X buttons, the latter two of which are now "bean-shaped", of all things. Players at first were skeptical as to whether the scheme would be intuitive or not, but in any genre, the "A-centered" layout has proven to feel more comfortable and intuitive than anything we've played on before by cleary giving each button its own unique shape and position. No more do you have to say "press the A button - it's the green one". Steps like this are slowly leading Nintendo and (we hope) the entire gaming industry into a bold new era in the early years of the 21st century.

On the gaming side of things, Nintendo has blatantly put a strong focus on innovation. Whether a reinvention of a classic gaming series or something spectacular on its own, Nintendo's GameCube games are far more than a graphical note higher than those of their previous generation. Some describe it as being like playing games for the first time in your life, only this time around with the characters you've grown up loving. Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and The Legend of Zelda exemplify reinvention, while games like Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and Super Monkey Ball have taken us to new heights all on their own, and are quickly becoming classics.