Nintendo's Shigeru Myomoto (the brain behind many of Nintendo's most popular characters, such as Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda) let slip in an interview at last month's Electronic Entertainment Expo, that Pikmin 3 is in development, and that it is going 'extremely well'.
Pikmin are small, brightly coloured, onion-like creatures that inhabit a distant planet. Each variety of pikmin have their own special abilities - blue pikmin are the only ones that can survive in water, red pikmin are resistant to fire, and yellow pikmin can carry bombs.
The only way to beat these crazy toad/chicken hybrids in the first game was to throw Pikmin at its back. Throw them towards its face, and the poor things just get gobbled up.
In the original Pikmin game, players play as Captain Olimar, an astronaut from the planet Hocotate, who manages to crash land on the pikmin planet, which breaks his ship apart. With the pieces of his ship scattered across all corners of the globe, and the planet's high concentration of oxygen, which is toxic to his species, things don't look good for the portly spaceman. His life support system will only manage to keep him alive for thirty days, giving him a tight deadline to put his ship back together. Luckily for him, however, Captain Olimar soon discovers the mysterious alien race who inhabit the planet, known as the Pikmin, which he finds will happily obey his commands. Using them to solve puzzles, ranging from breaking down walls, to carrying items and defeating enemies, it's up to you to grow, and make use of your pikmin army, as you race to put his ship back together.
In the sequel, Captain Olimar returns to his home planet to find the company he works for has fell into debt - and him and his friend Louie are now tasked with returning to the Pikmin planet, to repay the native race for all their hard work, and for saving his life, by stealing all of their valuables, to pay off his company's debt. And somewhat inexplicably, the pikmin still help you. Playing in much the same way as the first game, Pikmin 2 adds three new pikmin varieties - a purple one that is much stronger than the other varieties, a white pikmin that is immune to poison, and Bulbmin - pikmin that are immune to most hazards, but are weaker than their friends.
The Pikmin are tiny, and luckily, so are you. Unfortunately, your enemies are less so.
At the moment, very little has been revealed on the subject of Pikmin 3 - with Shigeru Miyamoto's comment on how well Pikmin was developing, being the only thing we have to go on at the moment, we can only assume Pikmin 3 will have more of the same, onion-y gameplay of it's predecessors. Could this be a title for the 3DS, or, with the game's predecessor having been released on the New Play Control scheme on the Wii, will Pikmin 3 be heading to the home system?
