GCN - Pikmin

Entry posted by EricBall July 10, 2006

370 views

Another rental, this one I picked out. I completed a little over a third of the game so far.

Pikmin is best described as a lite RTS (that's Real Time Strategy) game. You need to divide your time between creating Pikmin (by harvesting pills, plants and defeated animal enemies) and gathering your ship parts (by removing objects and enemies from your path). You have 30 game days (each lasting ~15 minutes) to collect the 30 ship parts (although I'm not sure all are necessary). Each day you pick a landing site to explore; and at the end of the day you have to marshall your Pikmin back to the landing site or they're eaten overnight. The game allows you to optionally save at the end of each turn.

I think the most frustrating part, for me, is the time limit versus the number of parts. Days where I wasn't able to retrieve a part were judged a failure. And although it's a simple matter to restart the day, that feels like cheating to me - like re-loading the Leisure Suit Larry savegame every time I lost playing blackjack. I prefer the realism of having to lick my wounds and try again the next day. Yes, it may be possible to recover more than one part per day, but that's much harder.

I also didn't realize at first that you can bring up a map of the landing site which also shows where each part and Pikmin are. (Maybe it wasn't there to begin with and was only available after I retrieved certain parts or number of parts.) On one hand having the map solved the problems I was having with finding parts and stray Pikmin at the end of the day. But I also found it made the game, to a certain extent, too easy. Part of the challenge and fun in games like SM64 was exploring each world and finding hidden red coins. Maybe something more like Civilization would have been better, where you could see places you explored, and it was only later in the game when you could see everything.

Was it fun? Yes. Throwing around Pikmin is almost as fun as slapping Imps playing Dungeon Keeper. But they're also frustrating. They have a habit of falling off bridges into the water and drowning, or chopping down half-grown flowers, or waking that creature that you were carefully avoiding.

I will probably end up renting Pikmin again, or buying it used at a decent price. (I'm not sure on the replay value, but I can see it would take more than a couple of weekly rentals to finish it, which makes buying it used cheaper.) There's also Pikmin 2, which I'll consider after I've passed final judgement on Pikmin.

1 Comment

Recommended Comments

cd-w 561

Posted July 10, 2006

Pikmin follows the premise of many old-style games: take a simple idea and do it very well. It is one on my favourite GC games, though I do have a slight preference for Pikmin 2. The annoying time limit has been removed in Pikmin 2, which gives you much more freedom to explore, though the levels are harder to complete. In Pikmin 1, the map is only available after you collect the "Whimsical Radar", so you would not have been able to use it initially. Also, you can line up the Pikmin (by holding down the gather button if I remember correctly), which helps to prevent them falling in the water, or disturbing monsters.

Chris