NINTENDO needed something special. With the N64 fading fast, the Dreamcast selling steadily and the PS2 almost here it couldn't afford to fall further behind.

Project Dolphin, the name given to Nintendo's next generation console, has been in development for a long time.

Typical of Nintendo, however, little news has been leaked of the system and some critics had started to wonder if the machine actually existed at all.

Nintendo answered those critics in emphatic style this week. It's new machine will be called the Gamecube, a daft name but then so was the PlayStation and no one thinks twice about that anymore do they?

Sony has made much of the PS2's DVD playback. The next generation consoles are finally able to deliver the multimedia promises made for the Cdi and the CD32 nearly ten years ago.

Nintendo reckons Gamecube is "the ultimate TV game machine and the first of its kind". Grandiose stuff but there are signs that relative failure of N64 has softened the company's traditionally high handed attitude towards third party developers. A spokesman acknowledged as much at the Gamecube's launch when he admitted: "The Nintendo 64 was a highly advanced piece of hardware. However, because it had such superior capabilities, developers probably felt as if it was a "challenge" for them to produce for it. Because of this N64 gained a reputation of being a difficult system on which to develop games.

"Additionally, in response to the demand for new types of entertainment from users in the game trade, the scale of games became larger, and frequently special adjustments to software had to be made. This came back to haunt the developers in the form of development costs and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it made software development more challenging.

"This type of problem, if not solved, could have a dramatic effect on the success of the game business."

So, instead of going for the highest possible performance, Nintendo has taken the route Sega adopted for Dreamcast.

The idea "was to create a developer-friendly next generation TV game machine that maintained above-standard capabilities".

As expected, the console also looks radically different from anything that's gone before. In common with the N64, there are four ports on the front

The Gamecube mirrors the N64 with its four ports on the front, but any other resemblance is purely coincidence. The machines unveiled in Japan on Thursday came in four colours - red, purple, green, and grey - a far cry from the understated N64.

The game pad looks to be as radical a departure for the industry as the N64's three pronged affair was. There's a normal D-pad, shoulder buttons and an analogue stick but the layout of the buttons seems, frankly, bizarre.

A big "action" button lies dead-centre on the controller with the rest strewn across the fascia in an apparently haphazard manner. To ensure the cube's success Nintendo has allied itself to some of the biggest names in the industry.

Matushita is providing a proprietary DVD-ROM, IBM handles the 400MHz processor, Ati and S3 handle the graphics.

So far, there's no word on the games likely to accompany the Cube when it launches world-wide next October but a sequel to the high acclaimed Super Metroid seems a certainty.

As it did with the PlayStation, Nintendo has given Sony a head start in the next generation games war. Will that start prove to be crucial or can the Cube claw back lost ground?

The fight back starts here.