Pikmin

The Good
The gameplay is, for the most part, very fun and always rewarding. You have the daylight hours to help Olimar lead his Pikmin to ship parts waiting to be reclaimed, and in some maps you can get several parts in a single day. At the end of the day, you fly up into the sky with your Pikmin to avoid the dangerous creatures who like to eat you. A couple of the maps even give you a chance to retrieve several ship parts in a single day, which makes the part-per-day schedule more manageable. The Pikmin are very responsive to your controls and will follow your every command. Sometimes they'll get distracted by something and start to do things on their own, but this normally doesn't occur in dangerous situations and helps make the Pikmin seem alive.

The sound for the game is a perfect fit. The Pikmin make high pitched little noises of joy then you pluck them out of the ground, or little "hut hut hut hut" noises as they lug a ship part back to your ship. The music changes based on the presence of enemies, as well, so you've got audio queues to tell if you're about to be pounced on by a flying beetle or a boss creature of some kind.

The frustration you'll feel from ruining your progress in a day (and early on, you'll be able to manage to ruin a whole day's work very easily) is outweighed by the attachment you can begin to form with Olimar. Olimar is given a distinct personality, and you will frequently see him musing about his pending doom or longing to see the faces of his kids again. These extra little details make the world real enough that you can't walk away from the game until you've make sure Captain Olimar is safe, and if you get behind schedule you actually become concerned for the tiny alien.

The Bad
Frustration can set in when you need to manipulate the simple control scheme to do complex things. Some types of Pikmin are suited to specific tasks, and trying to pick specific types can be difficult when you have an army of 100 running around. This can mean you end up killing all of them off, and if you mess up that bad towards the end of a day you have no choice but to restart and try again. The maps beg to be explored, as well, but the time limit doesn't allow the option. If you spend too much time wandering around and having fun with your Pikmin, you can get too far behind schedule to win.

Anyone who has played a Lemmings game will also be familiar with a Pikmin's complete lack of self preservation. It's important for a player to get used to keeping his mass of Pikmin where they want them, because these little creatures won't hesitate to destroy themselves in all kinds of ways.

The Bottom Line
It's easy to initially assume on at first glance that Pikmin is a simple game aimed at children. On a closer look, like many other Nintendo titles, that first impression is wrong. Hidden beneath the colorful and simple looks is a game that can be as challenging and frustrating as any puzzle or strategy game, and Pikmin is a hybrid of both. The mix means a lot of fun along the way, though!

This game should be recommended to anyone who owns a GameCube. Anyone who is even remotely a fan of Nintendo has to play through this instant classic at least once, although beating it would be very challenging for the youngest players. Heck, if you collect games at all, this belongs in your collection.

The Good
What an amazingly refreshing game! Shigeru Miyamoto, the Game Master, came up with one of the most unique, imaginative games ever.
The worlds are huge, the graphics are lush, colorful and surprisingly realistic. The main character, Olimar, who is about the size of a quarter is funny and quirky, but the real stars of the show are the PIKMIN! Not only are they cute as buttons, they are the most amazing little creatures to grace a video game!
What is good about this game? Simply everything. There are amazing puzzles to solve, deadly creatures to battle and all kinds of real-estate to explore.
The puzzles are fiendishly hard, not impossible or hopeless, but very, very well constructed.
The pikmin are not only cute, but fun to control, and have amazing skills. Each colour having it’s own unique attribute.
Every new “treasure” that Olimar finds with the help of his loyal Pikmin, is a nice surprise. This game has an overall fun feel. It is an exciting place to be and explore.
The control of the characters is amazing! Not only is it easy, but you control Olimar and the Pikmin simultaneously, and it is ergo-dynamically friendly too! No stretching of fingers across the controller or elaborate button combos. It is an elegant design, you can see Master Miyamoto’s fingerprints all over it!

The Bad
The biggest problem, which EVERYONE HATED, was the time limit! It is such a shame that they put this horrible limit into the gameplay. It is really distracting and gets a wee bit annoying also. It isn't a major factor in your ability to play, but if you don't acquire X number of parts for your ship then you lose. It makes you tend to focus on the parts and rewards, instead of exploration and discovery, which is the most fun. You always feel the need to hustle. You can’t relax and play the game at your leisure.

The Bottom Line
This is already a classic and a must have in a collection. It has hours and hours of fun playtime and is hypnotic in it’s world and story. If you are a lover of puzzle solving and strategy, you will LOVE this title! You get completely pulled into Olimar’s plight and his “world”. Parents do not have to worry as this is mild violence with no gore or blood. Some of the creatures are scary, but nothing too bad. But it is a very intricate puzzle solving game, and some of the youngsters won’t understand the concepts or ideas. This is a wonderful, wonderful game!

The Good
Rarely does a video game come along that has such an unusual, fresh style of gameplay that, until then, was hardly ever touched upon. Well, meet Pikmin, an presumably obscure game that you are shocked to see that the creators of Mario made. If you thought that, you would be wrong.

The story of Pikmin, at first, seems like the typical "main character is in certain doom" type of story. But wait. There appears to be a bulb of some sort. What could it be? You walk up to it and BANG! It pops out of the ground, turns red, sprouts legs, and produces a seed. And, deep in your mind, you think, "What the hell just happened?". Well, you just started a new species...called Pikmin.

The game play is like none I have seen to often. Basically, you must gather objects into the "Onion" (Pikmin Mother Ship) and place objects such as Pellets and dead insects into it to make more Pikmin... and more... and more... and even more until you have a picnic's worth of Pikmin! Once you've done this, you can gather the parts of the ship you crash landed, getting one step closer to getting home each time. This type of gameplay, in one word, is: unique.

The music sounds almost as if it came straight from a Pixar short film. Not that that's a bad thing. In fact, if you think about it, the Pikmin themselves seem like Pixar film characters. If Pikmin gets a movie, it HAS to be made by Pixar. No one else. And it should NOT be live action.

The Bad
Even though this game is truely inspirational, there are a few problems. For one, and this almost never happens on a GameCube, the frame rate is AWFUL!!! I think the reason for this could be because of the motion blur when you use the camera.

There is also something really strange with the whistle. It seems like when you blow it, it takes Pikmin a second or two to respond. Wait... THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS!!!!

The Bottom Line
Even though it has some very, very annoying things with it, it is still a truely innovative piece of work. I hope that ,some day, Nintendo, Sega, Valve, or any company comes out with a game within the decade that truely feels like no other and is unique in all ways. Until then...sigh.