No luck at my Best Buy with the free extra game with the Mario bundle, so I returned it. As spasmolytic mentioned earlier, do Target stores actually sell the Mario bundle and allow another free game, or was this just really fortunate on his part?

Eternal Darkness can be had for cheap at Best Buy if you can find it. I got it for $15 after the $19.99 price and the $5 Gamers Gift Card coupon.

The Resident Evil series games (the guide for RE0 is currently 1 cent at Best Buy) Resident Evil can be had fairly cheap...

People are pretty interested in Zelda (Doesn't look like its one for me though). It's coming out in March.

I only have a cube right now, so I'm currently playing through Baldur's Gate on it, (reviews said the release for the other platforms was better, but I'm liking it pretty well on GC so far) It was recently $19.99 at EB, which I price matched and used a $5 off coupon at Best Buy on).

Here is how I got the 2 free games and 2 free memory cards. You have to be kinda slick (and lucky).

I saw 1 GC left in the display case that had a Mario Sunshine bundle. I found a Target employee and asked if the gamecubes come with a free game without pointing out the bundle GC in the case. She said no, knowing this was not the case I went to customer service and got a Target circular (they should still have the same circular since I did this on Monday)

I found the GC free game deal in the circular and showed it to the employee, she apologized for telling me the wrong thing and I directed her to the GC which had the bundled Mario Sunshine (getting her to take this specific box was difficult but I managed to pull it off ) then I picked out my free metroid which also had the memory card bundled in and was on my way. Oh, one more thing. The GC rang up at 160 due to the free game and she thought that was incorrect and changed the price to 150. haha.

I stopped at Best Buy before going to Target but they were pretty cleaned out on Gamecube already.

If I had a gun I probably would have pulled the trigger on my GC after chasing that damn octupus mid-boss in the 3rd dungeon in Ocarina of Time around and around for an hour.

I'd forgotten how annoying that bastard was.

It now appears both BB and Target both don't include SMS bundle in the free game promotion. That is, unless you can manage to find clueless employees like spasmolytic did. BB had a computer glitch that allowed SMS bundle purchase to qualify for the free game, but it was fixed last week. CC pretty much disallowed the free game with SMS bundles from the start.

PAL

odd, i didn't have any problem at all getting it to work with a mario bundle at best buy. paid the ten extra bucks for mario and the memory card, and the other two games rung up for free automatically. Came back with a $5 promo for a wavebird and did the zelda preorder for $15.

enjoying the hell out of it. how's the wavebird with batteries?

Well, I tried at 2 BBs last Tuesday, because I was trying to get the bundle with free NBA street. Both instances, NBA Street came up free, and the "free" game rang up full price. Then BB employees would deny the purchase of the bundle at that point, telling me the deal only works with non-bundled Gamecubes.

PAL

bummer. guess i was just lucky...sort of surprised at 1) the inflexibility and 2) the inconsistency considering they are all pretty much on the same system...at least by region.

then again, it is best buy. i've had some bad customer service experiences there myself.

anyway, sorry it didn't work out. still, this is a pretty great deal even without NBA Street if you can get Target/Wal-Mart to do it with a bundle.

good luck.

You guys are a bad influence.

I got the SMS bundle at Best Buy today and the register automatically subtracted the price of Metroid Prime.

The SMS bundle (system, SMS, memory card), Metroid Prime and Star Wars Rogue Leader for $175. Not bad.

I think I may have made a mistake. I haven't played much, so maybe things will turn around, but I'm not that impressed.

I didn't think I'd like Mario Sunshine anyway, so I wasn't disappointed with it. What surprises me is that Rogue Leader and Metroid are kind of disappointing. Neither is really bad, but they just don't seem that great. Metroid is plagued with horrible controls. Why didn't they use the right stick for viewing? It's just really clumsy, especially considering that you often have to switch visors.

The quickest way for me to judge if I like a game or not is how easy it is to put down. Maybe they will grow on me, but Rogue Leader and Metroid are both easy to walk away from. I doubt I can return anything at Best Buy, so hopefully I'll feel better about it after I play a bit more.

Metroid does take a while to get into.

I personally loved the controls. I'm not coordinated enough to use one stick to move and the other to look. I greatly prefer games where you have to hold R to look around. It's not as much an issume in MP IMO, due to the auto lock on with the L button. You really don't have to manually aim all that often. Mainly just when scanning.

I went back and played the first section again, taking my time to learn the controls and scanning everything. It's definately growing on me. It wasn't love at first sight, but I think I just rushed my initial judgement.

I'd still prefer to look with the right stick though. I keep trying to do it, so I'm going to have to train myself not to. The target lock helps though.

Should I be scanning every enemy before I blow it away?

Depends. You unlock an image gallery for scanning 50% of the scannable items in the game and to get the best ending you have to scan everything.

If those matter to you, then scan each enemy (just the first of each type of enemy, not every enemy) so you get all the creatures entries downloaded.

It's also good to scan enemies that you encounter for the first time b/c scanning will show their weak spots (and what weapon to use against them)

Does anyone know when the free game promotion ends?

If I could, I think I would return my GameCube to BestBuy. I don't really think I'll play it that much to justify the purchase. Maybe I can Ebay the system and the games separately and get most of my money back.

Gamecube is really turning around. Within a year, it will have all these games:

Zelda: Wind Waker
new Zelda game
Mario Sunshine
new Mario game
Resident Evil 4
F-Zero GC
Too Human
Metal Gear Solid(just announced!!)
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Eternal Darkness
Metroid Prime
Metroid Prime Sequel
Soul Calibur II
Splinter Cell
Wario World
Final Fantasy CC
Mario Kart
Sonic Adventure 3
Star Fox Armada

Of those, Zelda is the only one I'm interested in and that's just because of the hype (it looks great, but I've never played a Zelda game before).

I don't know anything about 'Too Human' and 'Wario World' though. Star Fox Armada is another one that I might be interested in but I don't know anything about it at this point.

I'm still not 100% sure, but I'm afraid I would only have 1 or 2 games for the Gamecube and wouldn't play it much. I'm thinking about renting a couple of games tomorrow just to be sure. I was thinking of Pikmin and maybe Super Smash Brothers, although I would only be playing the single player mode.

Gromit:

I would look around and try a few games before giving up on GC. I love mine, but have always been a Nintendo fan. The library for me is even a little shallow, but that is classic Nintendo, they start slow and finish strong - a major flaw. A lot of great games are coming and though I may be wrong I think you would regret the sale later on.

You can't give up your Cube without trying Eternal Darkness or Animal Crossing. Well you could actually because its your decision, but you'd be missing out on two of the best games i've ever played . And if your into survival horror there's Resident Evil (which can be had for $19.99 now) and Resident Evil Zero. And later F-Zero. Those are a few of the games i've enjoyed but it all comes down to what you like though, but i thought i'd give you some ideas because i've been really happy with my GC.

So...what games DO you like?

I'm going to go rent a couple of GC games today. I agree that I need to give it more of a chance.

Part of it may be that this is the first Nintendo system that I've ever had. I never bought the NES, went with the Genesis over the Super NES, skipped the N64, etc. I've never played Zelda or any of the 'survival horror' games, even for the PSX (unless Onimusha counts).

Yeah, I know, blasphemy.

Until recently, I wasn't too thrilled with my Xbox either. But when I got the system, I couldn't put Halo down so I didn't feel bad about buying the Xbox at that time. Metroid doesn't have that same feel for me, but I think if I stick with it it will grow on me.

Games I'm going to try to rent today: Pikmin, Eternal Darkness, Super Smash Brothers, or anything else that catches my eye (up to 3 or 4 max).

Thanks for the suggestions.

So let me ask you a question... why did you buy it?

I mean I picked up my GC because I knew there were games that I wanted, specifically RE. I have yet to pick up an X-Box for 2 reasons, I'm not sure there is a game I must have that is only available there (although HALO may be it and I just have not played it at a friend's house enough) and the right deal has not come along for me.

It will have to be a combination of those two things, great deal and games. Sounds like you jumped on the great deal without there being a must have game for you?

IMO, the wavebird with batteries works much better than the wavebird without. YMMV, though.

I've been changing batteries about every two months. That's with pretty good use of my Cube.