Pikmin 2 NGC Review Denver CO

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Nintendo returns to the quirky puzzle-related action of the Pikmin world withPikmin 2. It's a great little title that sorts out a lot of the more annoying quirks of the original, but at the end of the day, it's still a title that will only attract those who really appreciated the original game.

At the end of the first game, Captain Olimar successfully escaped from a hostile alien world with the help of tiny multicoloured onion-like creatures, the Pikmin. Returning to his home world, he finds his employer, Hocotate Freight, in severe financial difficulties. They've sold his ship and everything in it, leaving them with only one old clunky freighter and a massive debt hanging over their heads. Olimar's sole remaining possession, a bottle cap that he found on the planet of the Pikmin, is scanned by the freighter, and found to be worth a small fortune. That's enough context for the president of Hocotate freight to send Olimar, along with a sidekick, Louie, out to the planet of the Pikmin to recover more treasure and pay off the crippling 20,000 Poko debt that the company has owing. Naturally, the first thing that you do upon landing is find some friendly Pikmin willing to bow to your every whim. They're accommodating little vegetables like that.

Intergalactic banks must be pretty accommodating places, as while the company is indeed in deep financial trouble, there's no immediate urgency that places a time limit on Louie's and Olimar's adventures. Unlike the first game, which gave you a scant 30 days to rescue Olimar, Pikmin 2 gives you an unlimited timeframe to work in, although you're still governed by a day/night cycle that sees you leaving the planet each day to avoid the vicious night-time beasts that roam the surface. Dropping the time limit gives you a lot more freedom to explore and lessens the pressure, and it also removes the terrible position that you could end up in with the first game where you knew you didn't have long enough remaining to get all of the ship parts back together.

Unlimited time isn't the only trick that Pikmin 2 brings to play. By bringing along a sidekick, the scope of many puzzles is expanded, as you can set Louie and Olimar on different tasks, assigning groups of Pikmin to each of them. The three classic Pikmin colours - Red, Yellow and Blue - return, along with two new types of Pikmin, Purple and White. Unlike the Red, Yellow and Blue Pikmin (who are respectively flame, electricity and water-resistant), Purple and White Pikmin aren't generated from seeds within onions, but are instead essentially mutated Pikmin of other colours. Purple Pikmin are super-strong and super-slow, while white Pikmin are fast, poisonous when ingested by enemy creatures, created when you throw Pikmin into flowers found in the underground lairs - which form the last part of the truly new content in Pikmin 2.