I have to say that Pikmin was in fact the very first Gamecube game i ever got. This was almost entirely due to the fact that none of the other games on offer looked interesting, or belonged to genres that i simply didn't like. The day i fork out £40 for Disney's Tarzan Untamed is the day that money is no longer neccessary in society, at which point the exchange would simply be that of rather embarassing antiques.
With that in mind, I didn't know at the time what to expect of Pikmin. I'd played many Nintendo games on both the SNES, and N64, and this game was simply crazy by comparison. The majority of Nintendo's in-house developments had previously consisted of solid, imaginative but repetitive platform games and solid, imaginative but repetitive adventure games. Suddenly here was Pikmin, looking like an rts/puzzle gamer crossbreed wagging its tail expectantly hoping to be taken to a loving home on its own merits. Being something of a kind and curious soul, I took it in.
The story, to any who don't know it, consists of this Captain Olimar travelling the galaxy in his spaceship when all of a sudden an asteroid smashes his ship, crashing him into a nearby planet and scattering many vital parts across it. It turns out he only has a limited air capacity, as for some unknown reason he cannot breathe the atmosphere of this planet. With the aid of some creatures who decide to become attached to him, the Pikmin of the title, he travels across the planet's surface locating various ship parts, and uses it to eventually fly away home. At this point, i should point out that he decided to call them Pikmin after his favourite brand of carrots. At this same point you will either become endeared in a cutsy bashful way, or vomit noisily at the sickening level of sentimentality and bright colours. I became a rather irritated fence-sitter, alternately being disgruntled by cutesy pie storytelling but occasionally finding myself going "Awwww".
The game itself is fairly well designed. Unlike many more modern games, the difficulty curve decides to progress at an even rate, which allows you to adjust and adapt accordingly(I need a brownie point for aliteration). The controls, and I cannot emphasise this enough, are not frustrating. Unlike many 'cool' Xbox 360 games, I never found myself literally shouting at the screen because the good Captain did something I didn't want him to. In large herds the Pikmin did become somewhat difficult to control, but my easy-going nature allowed me to laugh like a supervillain whenever I accidentally committed mass genocide by leading 100 red pikmin into water. Ditto for whenever 40 or so Pikmin managed to die because I didn't realise i'd left them behind a wall and so wouldn't pathfind their way around this obstacle, also known as Age of Empires Disease. The one thing that can be levelled at this game, and i'd have to agree, is that the game has no replayability of any kind. There's no minigames, skirmishes, multiplayer, not a jot, a single solitary sausage (make that 2 brownie points). At the time, my other big problem was that Pikmin took up a massive chunk of one's gray and mediocre official memory cards, but that can be put down to me not being imaginative enough to find those really cool memory cards that had the storage space of the Tardis.
It never had cutting edge graphics, even at the time. I think some of the latter N64 games' graphics could have given it a run for its money. Having said that, it never made an impact because the game was never going for gritty realism i.e sepia tones and/ or flickering lights. It never made an impact, as imagining this as a real experience went by pretty much when you found out his name was Olimar, and tried to convince yourself he wasn't that strange animated character with a space suit from those yoghurt ads who looked almost identical. The one thing on the realism front the graphics succeed in doing is making the setting feel alive. Despite everything, the textures and models succeed in making this feel like a lush planet full of life, and that improved the game experience for me considerably, rather than many other games that make you feel like all other goings-on have ceased whilst you send legions of cretins at one another/ send blocks crashing down from the sky to form lines/ race across the Mushroom Kingdom in an effort to find Princess Peach only to find that she's in another castle.
Overall, for a Nintendo game it succeeded in straying from their usual territory whilst still feeling like a Nintendo game, and created a rich environment to tell either a disgustingly cute tale of friendship or a heartwarmingly cute tale of friendship depending. My one complaint is that it trod a very fine line in terms of tone. Despite its cutesy nature, for once it's made clear that if you fail to complete this game Olimar is going to die, from suffocation. Not only that, there's the aforementioned mass genocide and the fact that the local wildlife will scrunch Pikmin like it's no tomorrow. But what matters to me far more is the fact that unlike most of the games around it, it tried to be different and succeeded. It's a rare occasion when Nintendo tries out a totally new idea, and if any fans are trying to prove this does sometimes happen, then they should point to this game as a shining example, though they'd be wrong because it's an exception, and Nintendo letting go of Mario and co. is like Linus letting go of his safety blanket
With that in mind, I didn't know at the time what to expect of Pikmin. I'd played many Nintendo games on both the SNES, and N64, and this game was simply crazy by comparison. The majority of Nintendo's in-house developments had previously consisted of solid, imaginative but repetitive platform games and solid, imaginative but repetitive adventure games. Suddenly here was Pikmin, looking like an rts/puzzle gamer crossbreed wagging its tail expectantly hoping to be taken to a loving home on its own merits. Being something of a kind and curious soul, I took it in.
The story, to any who don't know it, consists of this Captain Olimar travelling the galaxy in his spaceship when all of a sudden an asteroid smashes his ship, crashing him into a nearby planet and scattering many vital parts across it. It turns out he only has a limited air capacity, as for some unknown reason he cannot breathe the atmosphere of this planet. With the aid of some creatures who decide to become attached to him, the Pikmin of the title, he travels across the planet's surface locating various ship parts, and uses it to eventually fly away home. At this point, i should point out that he decided to call them Pikmin after his favourite brand of carrots. At this same point you will either become endeared in a cutsy bashful way, or vomit noisily at the sickening level of sentimentality and bright colours. I became a rather irritated fence-sitter, alternately being disgruntled by cutesy pie storytelling but occasionally finding myself going "Awwww".
The game itself is fairly well designed. Unlike many more modern games, the difficulty curve decides to progress at an even rate, which allows you to adjust and adapt accordingly(I need a brownie point for aliteration). The controls, and I cannot emphasise this enough, are not frustrating. Unlike many 'cool' Xbox 360 games, I never found myself literally shouting at the screen because the good Captain did something I didn't want him to. In large herds the Pikmin did become somewhat difficult to control, but my easy-going nature allowed me to laugh like a supervillain whenever I accidentally committed mass genocide by leading 100 red pikmin into water. Ditto for whenever 40 or so Pikmin managed to die because I didn't realise i'd left them behind a wall and so wouldn't pathfind their way around this obstacle, also known as Age of Empires Disease. The one thing that can be levelled at this game, and i'd have to agree, is that the game has no replayability of any kind. There's no minigames, skirmishes, multiplayer, not a jot, a single solitary sausage (make that 2 brownie points). At the time, my other big problem was that Pikmin took up a massive chunk of one's gray and mediocre official memory cards, but that can be put down to me not being imaginative enough to find those really cool memory cards that had the storage space of the Tardis.
It never had cutting edge graphics, even at the time. I think some of the latter N64 games' graphics could have given it a run for its money. Having said that, it never made an impact because the game was never going for gritty realism i.e sepia tones and/ or flickering lights. It never made an impact, as imagining this as a real experience went by pretty much when you found out his name was Olimar, and tried to convince yourself he wasn't that strange animated character with a space suit from those yoghurt ads who looked almost identical. The one thing on the realism front the graphics succeed in doing is making the setting feel alive. Despite everything, the textures and models succeed in making this feel like a lush planet full of life, and that improved the game experience for me considerably, rather than many other games that make you feel like all other goings-on have ceased whilst you send legions of cretins at one another/ send blocks crashing down from the sky to form lines/ race across the Mushroom Kingdom in an effort to find Princess Peach only to find that she's in another castle.
Overall, for a Nintendo game it succeeded in straying from their usual territory whilst still feeling like a Nintendo game, and created a rich environment to tell either a disgustingly cute tale of friendship or a heartwarmingly cute tale of friendship depending. My one complaint is that it trod a very fine line in terms of tone. Despite its cutesy nature, for once it's made clear that if you fail to complete this game Olimar is going to die, from suffocation. Not only that, there's the aforementioned mass genocide and the fact that the local wildlife will scrunch Pikmin like it's no tomorrow. But what matters to me far more is the fact that unlike most of the games around it, it tried to be different and succeeded. It's a rare occasion when Nintendo tries out a totally new idea, and if any fans are trying to prove this does sometimes happen, then they should point to this game as a shining example, though they'd be wrong because it's an exception, and Nintendo letting go of Mario and co. is like Linus letting go of his safety blanket
