New Play Control Pikmin

One of the best features of the Nintendo Wii is one that gets overlooked in all the excitement over its motion sensing controls. You can take games from Nintendo’s previous console, the GameCube, and play them on the Wii.

This is great if you own a GameCube and want to relive some classics, but it’s also perfect for anyone wanting to bolster their games collection on the cheap. Of course, some of these games haven’t aged particularly gracefully, but they also don’t support the Wii remote.

In an effort to fix that Nintendo has launched New Play Control! which re-launches GameCube classics as special Wii compatible versions. The first in this series is Pikmin, a quite bizarre title which is part strategy and part gardening game, and which was first released in 2001.

In Pikmin you take control of a tiny space explorer named Olimar, trapped on a planet populated by Pikmin, strange flower creatures who are quite happy to be bossed around by Olimar. You can grow and command the Pikmin, using them to build structures, harvest material and fight against other beasties.

Since the game relies on you pointing and clicking to move and command the Pikmin the translation to the Wii is perfect. It’s far more intuitive than the old GameCube pad controls. The visuals haven’t changed from the original, but although you can tell it’s an eight year old game Pikmin’s stylised cartoon graphics still hold up today.

Pikmin remains a charming, intriguing and addictive game, just like it was on the GameCube but with a control system that’s an improvement even over the elegant controls of the original pad. Its biggest problem is that Pikmin 2 is also due a Wii remake soon, and that’s vastly superior to Pikmin 1, so you may want to hold off for that instead.

Verdict: 80%

It may be eight years old but this remains a classic game, it has aged extremely graceful and the new and improved controls are a joy. You might want to hold for Pikmin 2 instead, though.