Difference Between Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Gamecube

Nintendo Wii vs Nintendo Gamecube

The Wii and Gamecube are both consoles from Nintendo that has carried their famous game characters Mario, Donkey Kong, and many others. The main difference between the two is their age as the Gamecube is the predecessor of the Wii. Production of the Gamecube has been discontinued since 2003 and no new units or games are available for it. On the other hand, the Wii is still Nintendo’s latest console and it has a great number of games with a lot more expected titles.

With the Wii, Nintendo moved away from the usual six axis controllers that most consoles had at that time; including the Gamecube. They designed and implemented a motion controller that relies mostly on the motion of the player rather than key presses. This forces the player to get out of his chair and really move. Another side effect of the motion controller is the relative user friendliness of the Wii. Even much older people can still participate in games like Wii Sports and just pick-up the mechanics right away since the motion is very relatable to the action on-screen. You really can’t achieve that with the Gamecube as most games require complex combinations of key presses in order to execute moves.

In terms of size, the Gamecube is much bigger than the Wii as it tried to look like and actual cube. The Wii is a much thinner tower and requires its base in order to stands upright. The use of wireless controllers also adds to the sleekness of the Wii as you can easily hide all the wires behind the unit. The Gamecube has 4 controller ports up front and the wires can get pretty messy unless you remove the controllers every time you are done playing.

Lastly, Nintendo has abandoned the use of the smaller 80mm discs, as it was with the Gamecube, and went with standard 120mm sized discs with the Wii. The larger discs hold more data and reduces the need for spanning games across multiple discs or excessively compressing movies.

Summary:

  1. The Gamecube is a much older console than the Wii and has since been discontinued
  2. The Gamecube uses the standard controllers while the Wii uses motion controllers
  3. The Wii is more user friendly than the Gamecube
  4. The Wii is sleeker and smaller compared to the Gamecube
  5. The Gamecube uses a smaller disc compared to the Wii