Miyamoto Shrine > Nintendo Gamecube > Pikmin Review

At first I didn't really care for Pikmin, I was looking out for the latest games starring Nintendo franchise characters, but after reading a few impression articles about it I found out that this game sounds as addictive as hell. It's a shame that people didn't think this way at trade shows, my friend who went to E3 didn't even play the game just because he hadn't heard anything about it.

In Pikmin you're a lost space man and you've got to use the Pikmin to kill enemies and other stuff like tear down walls or repair bridges in order to find the missing parts of your spacecraft. When you're Pikmin kill an enemy it drops a tablet which can be taken back to your base which in turn gives you more Pikmin, how many are needed to carry it depends on the enemy your Pikmin killed. This may sound complicated but if you buy this game it will soon become a part of your life.

The game features a zelda-esque day and night feature, each days lasts about 15 minutes and as soon as night hits you will automatically fly away in your ship to avoid all the big enemies that wake up. All Pikmin that you leave behind are lunch for the bad guys.

The whole idea of the game is to find all 30 parts of your spaceship, however you only have 30 days worth of oxygen left which gives you about 7 and a half hours of real-life time to complete the game. Their are six different areas in the game each containing puzzles to be solved and enemies to be defeated in order to get to your spaceship parts.

The game is very driven towards the different color Pikmin's abilitys. The red Pikmin cannot be harmed by fire and are good fighters, the yellow Pikmin can jump very high and are average fighters and the blue Pikmin cannot be harmed by water and are rubbish fighters. You'll find puzzles based around this like a wall in a pond that needs to be broken down by blue Pikmin, behind the wall you will find a spaceship part high in a tree guarded by a fire breathing monster, you will need to use the red Pikmin to defeat the monster and the yellow Pikmin to bring down the spaceship part.

The technology of Pikmin is based on the 100 Marios demo showed at Spaceworld 2000 where 128 Mario characters all ran around and reacted to their environment and each other. At E3 2001 Nintendo were juggling numbers around at how many Pikmin you could have out at once in the final game and they ended up putting a maximum of 100 Pikmin aloud to be controlled at any one time. This puzzles me a bit because it's obvious the Gamecube could handle more Pikmin at once, Nintendo even made the Pikmin's shadows disappear once you have more than 50 of them out!

The graphics in the game are almost photo-realistic when you're zoomed all the way out, the great lighting effects play tricks with your mind! Shigeru Miyamoto even took some of Pikmin's textures out of his own garden! Let's assume he didn't take the creatures from his own garden as well...

There's some great tunes in Pikmin waiting to be whistled too, some of the sound effects sound as if they were made on a SNES but that isn't exactly going to make you rush to the shops to return your copy of Pikmin, insulted.

The bad thing about Pikmin is a worrying trend from Nintendo's intial Gamecube launch games: It's too short. You could easily get 10 hours of play out of this game which is more than can be said about Luigi's Mansion, but once I completed the game I felt as if I'd been cheated out of what could have been a much better game. With a few extra areas and spaceship parts Pikmin could have easily got a 4 star rating from me but in it's current form it feels like Nintendo only made it so that they could make a better sequel.

Another bad thing that could probably be excused due to the fact that after all, this is a 1-player game, Pikmin has hardly any replay value. There's a challange mode where you can play any of the 6 areas and try to get the highest number of Pikmin in a days time, but quite frankly it got boring after one go.

Overall
Andy Robinson: Pikmin is a great game and will give anyone alot of fun out of playing it, but if videogames are your main hobey and you play them to finish them then Pikmin isn't going to last you much more than a week.

Review written by Andy Robinson

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