A lot has been said about Nintendo’s love/hate relationship with 3rd party publishers. Infendo decided to take a look at review scores for 3rd party games released on N64, GBA, GameCube, DS, and Wii. Comparing the aggregate scores from Metacritic, we were able to mathematically determine the Top 10 3rd Party Nintendo Games:
| 10 | Final Fantasy VI Advance [GBA] |
| 9 | International Superstar Soccer ’98 [N64] |
| 8 | Castlevania: Circle of the Moon [GBA] |
| 7 | Conker’s Bad Fur Day [N64] |
| 6 | SSX 3 [GameCube] |
| 5 | Soul Calibur II [GameCube] |
| 4 | Viewtiful Joe [GameCube] |
| 3 | Madden NFL 2004 [GameCube] |
| 2 | Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 [GBA] |
| 1 | Resident Evil 4 [GameCube] |
We discovered that 3rd party games for DS and Wii just don’t stack up against those for Nintendo’s legacy systems. In fact, the overall top games for GameCube were mostly 3rd party titles, none of which remained exclusive to the system.
There were significantly more 1st party releases getting top scores for N64, GBA, and DS. This shows us that Nintendo’s recent home consoles get good 3rd party support, while primarily leaving the handheld software to the Big N.
What would your list look like?