Pikmin 1 HD
Pikmin 1! I've heard a lot of things about this series especially from people like Ditto. The reason's I never played it are pretty silly too. Back when I was a kid, my first exposure to a lot of Nintendo characters (including Captain Olimar) was through Brawl. I distinctly remember selecting Olimar (who was already on my shit list because I thought he was ugly) and fucking up absolutely everything leading to me thinking he was annoying and dumb and lame and stupid. So that initally dissuaded me from ever picking up a Pikmin game. The second factor that stopped me from playing a Pikmin game (besides ignoring my stubborn desire to play game series in chronological order) was that hunting down Gamecube and even Wii games nowadays sucks! But thankfully this HD port got released fairly recently letting me easily obtain the means to give this series a shot.
I'll start by saying that I have basically zero experience with RTS games. A little silly considering that I'm primarily a PC gamer but stuff like RTS games and the RTS-adjacent MOBA genre never quite appealed to me. So in order to avoid sounding like a Nintedo fan by saying stuff like:
"Wow I sure love Nintendo's simplified take on a popular genre! The other one's I haven't played must suck!"
I'll instead say that Pikmin's got me opening my mind to the genre a little more. The task of dividing my attention across hunting down ship parts, fighting off enemies and keeping enough resources flowing to build my army really scratched a part of my brain I probably haven't felt since I played some RTS style flash game as a kid. It's all stupidly satisfying to watch my Army of Little Guys march across the planet as all the pieces of my plan fall into place. It seems really difficult to fail at this game and hit the 30 time limit but the idea of beating the game as fast as possible did give me enough of an incentive to really try optimizing my days to the point that I was kicking myself that I somehow managed to end each area with one part left and having to shamefully waste a day to go down and grab it. INCLUDING THAT FUCKASS EMPEROR BULBAX AREA, IT WAS LIKE 5 FEET FROM THE SHIP AND THE DAY ENDED EHEGEHEGHEGRHREHREGHREGH.
Visuals in this game are prety simple but effective. I love the way early Gamecube/PS2 games look and Pikmin is packed with that aesthetic. The photorealistic environments backing the simplistic but cute chacters models of Olimar and the inhabitants of the Pikmin Planet make for a very charming graphical style. You can tell they were really trying to push how many entities they could cram on screen and it pays off, the game being released like a month after the Gamecube's launch is really impressive.
Overall Pikmin is really neat and the length is juuuust long enough to leave me satisfied with the expereience but still want more. So I'll close out here by showing my final stats.
