Maybe the GameCube has been discontinued. But as I mention in MTV Multiplayer today -- Reggie Fils-Aime to me at DICE: "The GameCube is still being made." -- maybe it's not.

Whatever the case, I decided today was a good day to say thank you and goodbye to Nintendo's purple console. I'm not kidding when I say in today's headline that the machine changed my life. If you want to know how, click the link above.

I've posted a few excerpts below:

The GameCube didn't blow me away at the start. This wasn't me unpacking a Nintendo 64 in my college dorm and deciding the real world couldn't compete with the three-dimensional land of "Super Mario 64". In fact, the GameCube never really blew me away.

I'd eventually play some GameCube games I consider all-time favorites, like "Pikmin 2" and both "Metroid Prime"s. But I also remember trying to convey to my girlfriend the magnificent importance of the GameCube release of the first new 3-D Super Mario game in six years, letting her play it first as a gesture of selfless love and then taking the controller from her and essentially saying, "Huh, you're right. This 'Super Mario Sunshine' doesn't feel like an instant classic."

Like the N64 before it, the GameCube was plagued with good-game droughts. The first hit early in 2002. I coped in three stages that each profoundly changed my gaming habit.

....

By 2003 I was writing a GameCube column for IGN in exchange for a free game every month or so. An IGN reader named Olimario hated the columns.

I think he hated me too.

He started message board threads calling for my dismissal. When that didn't work, he posted a list of writing tips that I should at least try to follow. Among them he implored me to make sure that each sentence I wrote had "no fewer than 19 words." [ST.COM READERS -- NOTE THAT LAST SENTENCE WAS INTENTIONALLY 19 WORDS LONG!] And he wanted more pizazz. 

He wanted me to show some "lust" for what I was writing about. It should be clear, he admonished me, that "you would jump at the chance to have sex with Nintendo." My IGN work led to actual paying freelance assignments, then games writing for The New York Times and eventually that path brought me to my gaming beat here at MTV. I owe some of that to the purple cube.

There's plenty more in Multiplayer. It's a long one, touching on everything from September 11th to "Cubivore."

Check it out.

(If you're reading this entry after the week I posted it, you'll have to flip through the multiplayer.mtv.com site back to the Feb 22 entry)