E3 2012 – Geekscape Games Plays Pikmin 3!

I along with pretty much every gamer here at Geekscape backflipped in excitement over the announcement of Pikmin 3. Partially because Pikmin has become a beloved member of the Nintendo household, with two fantastic games from years past, and partially so we won’t have to listen to Jonathan beg for it for another year. But as soon as I hit Nintendo’s booth, I had one priority, which was to see if this long awaited title still had it.

If you happened to catch the E3 reveal, the biggest addition to the game revealed so far is the inclusion of rock Pikmin. These guys can destroy enemy armor as well as crystalized walls that block your team of astronauts from advancing. Rather than collecting set items like before, the Pikmin were tasked with bringing various fruits back to the ship, each one worth a different value of money. Everything from cherries, strawberries and… enemy corpses (?) awarded me more money. Money that I had no idea what to do with, but I’m guessing that will be revealed in time.

One interesting thing was that there were no pods that grew new Pikmin for your team. All of the ones in the demo were already plucked and were just waiting to be found. When the enemies gave me money instead of seeds, I was wondering if we would still get to grow Pikmin at all. Unfortunately, that information wasn’t available yet, (i.e… the demonstrator didn’t know,) so I’ll just hope there will be a better way of expanding other than just coming across them.

Using the game pad as a map proved to be a big help as well, giving you a view of where each fruit was located and allowing you to plan a proper attack. After the stage was over, I had the ability to watch my playback to see where weaknesses in my paths were and try to find how to gather more in less time if I decided to play again.

So essentially, Pikmin 3 felt very familiar, which isn’t a bad thing when you’re as good as Pikmin. With improved graphics and mechanics that make the world feel more real, (like with your characters actually needing supplies to build,) on top of the addition of the Game Pad and motion controls to make playing more efficient, it’s looking like Pikmin 3 just might be worth the wait.