![]() Pikmin became possible because of the power of the GameCube, which could draw a hundred Pikmin on-screen. At that time, I thought it would be fun to watch creatures moving around following your own instructions, which later became one of the main ideas of Pikmin.” This demo displayed many Mario characters on-screen at once. “There are various starting points, but we exhibited a tech demo called Mario 128. How did the original Pikmin concept come to be, more than ten years ago? If you play Pikmin 3, you might acquire the skill to be efficient in your real life as well!” I believe that this is the common element from the very first Pikmin to the latest one. “In Pikmin it’s not easy to give instructions or do tasks efficiently, making it feel good when you actually accomplish them. This aspect of the game also leads to emotions that people never felt before while playing other games.” “The game was not designed following a particular theme, but the ‘harsh reality of the nature’ aspect does come out well, as we tried to follow the natural order of life. Pikmin shows how harsh nature can sometimes be, like when a bunch of your helpless carrot men get eaten by a gigantic lovebug. You could call it a puzzle game in the sense that it gets more and more fun as users play and work out a way to meet their objectives.” Hence, I consider Pikmin a new and original type of game that includes all of these aspects. “Although it’s basically an action game, there are some other elements such as puzzle-solving, simulation and realtime strategy, as you mentioned. “It’s an action game in which players make a number of Pikmin work, and the Pikmin move with artificial intelligence (AI), so I call it ‘AI action’. Pikmin contains puzzles, adventure and strategy. So for your reading pleasure, here is the unabridged, lightly edited transcript of our long-distance conversation. Still, I think there’s some interesting stuff in here. The email setup wasn’t ideal, and time constraints at Nintendo’s side kept me from sending in some follow-up questions. The interview was done via email for nrc.next, a Dutch daily newspaper. U in November, and it’s not a typical system seller, while something essential like Mario Kart 8 isn’t arriving until next year.ĭespite all this, I got the chance to do a Pikmin 3 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, the general manager of EAD, and, oh yeah, a living game design legend as well. In all, Pikmin 3 is the first great EAD game since New Super Mario Bros. Simultaneously, Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis & Development (EAD) department is having a hard time scaling up to full HD quality, making a 3DS type software avalanche wishful thinking at best. And at 3.5 million units sold, really taking advantage of the economies of scale seems quite far off. But a similar revolution seems tough to pull off on the Wii U front: a price drop should be nigh-impossible for the console and tablet combo, as they’re already being sold at a loss. The 3DS’s fortunes seem to have been turned for now, with a lower price and an impressive, growing game library. The game has a somewhat unfair mission: saving the Wii U in a time when Nintendo isn’t doing all that well. It’s glorious: detailed, well-made, unique, addictive. Playing it feels like a bit like stepping into a time machine, to a 2007 in which the company released a more powerful HD console instead of a GameCube extended with motion controls. Last Friday, Nintendo released Pikmin 3 in Europe, its first truly compelling 3D adventure game for Wii U.
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