Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 419: Pikmin

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Henry Gilbert, Bryan Auer, and Wesley Fenlon heed the call of Jeremy Parish's whistle and race to gather as much information about Nintendo's Pikmin franchise as possible, then return it to the Onion before sunset. Edits: Greg Leahy; artwork: Shaan Khan. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, Tales of the Pluckiest Hero of All. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. It's episode 400. And this week, as with many of the very recent weeks, we are talking about the 20th anniversary of something. In this case, we're skipping away from all that Xbox and PlayStation 2 stuff we've been doing lately to talk about the plucky upstart, the beloved underdog of the year 2001. That was Nintendo. Nintendo made video games. They made a brand new system in 2001, actually, and no one loved them.

except us, and that's why we were here, to talk about the game that no one expected much of before it launched and yet turned out to be the greatest thing at the GameCube launch. And that is Pickman, the Pickman series. Actually, we might just talk about Pickman 1. It kind of depends on how much we have to say. You know how it goes with my episodes. I put together a lot of notes, and then we get like halfway through. So, yes, if you are not familiar with this tendency, then you are new, and you need to know that my name is Jeremy Parrish.

I'm the host of this episode. And with me here in the same physical space, we have two people plus one remote. Why don't we go to the call-in participant first? Please introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Brian Hour, a longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm a streamer, podcaster, a lot of Nintendo stuff. I think I only stream stuff for the podcast, really. But, yeah, I've been playing Nintendo games all my life.

And we were a one system household growing up. And, you know, God damn it, if that wasn't going to be a system with a Mario game on it. So, yeah. Which system was that to begin with? To begin with? Oh, NES. Oh, okay. So you go way back, way back before the, before the Pikmin days.

We're, we're, uh, Mario and I are about the same, or the NES and I are about the same age. So, got it. We, we came up together. Understood. All right. And then here in this physical space, we have, uh, a regular. Hey, he's on a lot. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert.

And much like a red pickman, I am invulnerable to fire. But don't test that. Yeah, I was going to say, there is, there is a stove over here that I could try that out on. I'm staying in like, uh, beach paradise in Alameda, California. Yeah, it's a whole hotel room built about 50 years ago, and it's like an apartment and kind of smells a little bit like pee, but it's spacious and good for social distancing during a podcast. Anyway, also joining us and returning to Retronauts for the first time in quite a while, we have an occasional participant. Yeah, hi, West Fenland. I'm an editor for PC gamer, but I'm a GameC boy at heart.

I grew up with the GameCube and did the occasional accidental mass murder in Pickman, as we all did. I'm glad you qualified that within Pickman. Only in Pickman. That's my only mass murder. You never know. Is there a person who enjoyed killing Pickman ever? I don't know if it's possible to... I mean, that kid from Toy Story, I'm sure if he ever played Pickman, he would have been all about it.

It's a test for sociopathy to playing Pickman. Yeah. I guess so. Yeah, I think you're kind of almost like immunized from wanting to see Pickman die because you have to put so much effort into cultivating them, growing them. Yeah, just like even if you have no emotions, if you are a horrible, like, puppy murderer, there's still, you know, kind of the sunk cost and time involved in creating these resources. And, you know, you can view them as resources.

And so it's just wasteful to throw them all away. And then that death sound really just twists the knife on you. That's true. It's really the ghost. Seeing their ghosts is like, you're gone. I failed you. No. That's what I look for, yeah.

If this were a Sega game, they'd all have little halos when they die. It would just be like a little Pikmin with a halo. But it's not a Sega game. It's a Nintendo game. And Pickman debuted in October 2001 in Japan about a month after the GameCube itself. And then showed up here in the game. the U.S. at the end of the year, 2001, December, and about half a year later in Europe, because Nintendo is always that way with Europe.

But, you know, prior to actually playing this game for the first time, did you know anything about it? Did you have any expectations for it? Was it something you followed? For me, the GameCube was the first system I bought with my own money. Like, I had a job and I'm buying a GameCube because, like, N64 came out when I was 14, got it as my 14th birthday gift. But, like, I was almost, I was 19, so I was like, I'm going to buy this for me.

I'm working at AMC theaters, and I'm going to get it. And so, you know, I'm super prime for launch. And then I'm like, oh, boy, in two weeks after this or three weeks after this, Pickman's coming out. That's the next big game. Smash Brothers Melee. Sure, I'll probably play that some. But Pickman's the next real game from Shigiramiyamato, and I cannot wait.

And so, yeah, I was so pumped for it. like, pre-ordered it as soon as I could. And I remember, like, I was already a member of, like, the Nintendo Fun Club or whatever. And they sent you, they sent me, like, a press release. Like, hey, Pickman, it's the next thing for Miyamoto. You should care. I was like, I do care. I do.

Interesting. I didn't realize, yeah, I guess I had kind of checked out of Nintendo Fun Club quite some time before and kind of checked out of Nintendo with the N64. And the GameCube is what drew me back in. So I was like, I don't know what this is. Now, yeah, as all my friends were talking up there, you know, Xbox and stuff,

I had to be talked into buying, only because all my friends were also playing Halo and I was like, fine, I'll also get an Xbox, you jerks. But I was the one trying to pull all of them to the GameCube with me. But Pickman really wasn't the best tool for that, though I still loved every second of it. When I showed my friends,

they would just go like, could you put back Super Monkey Ball or Smash Brothers? we want to play that. I was obsessed with the GameCube in the months leading up to launch. I was in eighth grade. And so I was all about Rogue Squadron. I was like, this game looks photorealistic. It's amazing.

And Smash Brothers, I was annoying the shit out of my friends. You know, every new issue of EGM that had a new screenshot or something of melee, you know, I was super hyped on that. Pickman, I don't think was really on my radar that much. Like, I knew about it, but I wasn't fiending to buy it. And I ended up getting it as sort of a surprise Christmas gift that year and ended up really, really loving it, although, as we'll talk about it, it was also, like, surprisingly emotionally heavy game compared to what it looks like on the cover.

Yeah, what about you, Brian? I had Nintendo Power at this point. I think I got in right around the time the Game Boy Advance came out because I was just so ready for a Super Nintendo in my hand that, I guess it had never occurred to me that Nintendo Power was a thing I could, like, subscribe to. Like, I had, like, subscription to Disney Adventures when I was younger throughout the 90s, but I was like, that Nintendo Power is an unattainable thing. I have to occasionally get an issue or that's it.

But there were little blurbs here and there. They didn't really, it's a tough game to describe, especially when you don't know exactly what it's going to be, even though your Nintendo's PR in America. I think they still kind of are like, we don't know exactly what we're allowed to tell you because it's still changing. But, you know, you and your little plant guys are going to be best friends and are going to need each other. And that's going to be really important.

So we'll say that about once a month in each issue. I wanted it, but I just, I never ended up getting it. But I was very interested in the game. I read those blurbs every month. I think, too, by the time the game was coming out, I was aware of who Miyamoto was pretty well. Yeah, yeah. Especially, like, not just in Nintendo Power,

but also I was real active on, like, the IGN Nintendo community on their boards and stuff. And everybody was talking up like, oh, well, you know who created Mario and Donkey Kong and Zelda? This is the next one from that guy. And so it's a big deal. And Yellow Pickman is the next beloved character from the Antenopanthian. This is kind of when that, that narrative became a thing when everyone was like,

Miyamoto is the guy who created Donkey Kong, Mario, Yoshi, Zelda. Like, if you wanted to tell an adult or another kid who maybe didn't know as much about video games as you, you'd be like, this is the guy, man. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of, I wouldn't say cult, but that sort of idea of the super Star of Nintendo really took off around the time of Mario 64 and Akrona of Time because it was like, this is the dude, even though actually totally other people directed those games, but he was kind of seen as the godfather. So yeah, this was very much Nintendo saying like, hey, this is the next one. You're right. You're totally right about that. But, you know, for myself,

I had, like I said, I'd kind of checked out of the Nintendo thing and occasionally picked up interesting looking releases for my N64, but I was really plugged into PlayStation, and that was, that was where all my affections lay. But Game Boy Advance came out, and that kind of excited me, you know, it was like a portable NES, like you, or super NES, like you said, Brian. And I don't know, I looked at the next generation systems. I had PlayStation 2, and I felt like I could, I could do one or the other. I could do GameCube or Xbox, and GameCube seemed like the natural choice because it was going to have Nintendo franchises, whereas xbox had halo from the guys who made marathon that i loved but that didn't seem like the one thing

that would justify me buying an entire console so i went with game cube and uh got it over i got a japanese game cube over christmas 2001 i went to visit the girl i was dating who was a jet uh working in japan at the time so she got me one of the cool spice orange game cubes because you couldn't get those in america oh that's the dream that is the dream and yeah that was my birthday gift or Christmas gift sorry so you know while I was over there visiting her aside from being like wow Japan for the first time is so cool I picked up you know a few games to go with it Luigi's Mansion

Smash Brothers and Pickman and Luigi's Mansion was the one I I guess sink the most time into it first and Smash Brothers I tried to like and just I just can't I can't do it I can't enjoy those games and then Pickman I picked up and was like this seems interesting, but I don't think I get it. So it wasn't until a few months later that I went back and really revisited it. And that's when it kind of sunk its hooks into me, even though it was all in Japanese. And I didn't totally understand everything I was doing.

I still really enjoyed the experience of leading these little plant people around and leading Captain Olomar to a terrible demise because I wasn't playing quite right. But the game was really surprising. Like, I, you know, I kind of immediately recognized, oh, this is like a real-time strategy game, but it's totally different than any other RTS I've ever seen or played. It's, you know, it's just unique. And it had such a great worldview, like literally the world view that it presented was so appealing. And it really kind of took a different approach to visuals and aesthetics and art than just about anything else at the time.

It was like the only game around then, you know, the early sort of second generation 3D systems that was simultaneously realistic yet also beautiful as opposed to being like cartoonish and beautiful or realistic and extraordinarily muddy and dull. Like they somehow managed to combine the best of cartoon aesthetics with a sense like, you know, just really evoking a sense of place and of like here is an actual physical space that you can. you can exist in, and, you know, kind of bringing forward the, almost like the sort of realism that you saw in Wave Race 64 on N64, with the, like, the water physics and everything, where it just felt like, this isn't quite the usual from Nintendo. And this had that, too, even though it was a totally different kind of game. It just, it kind of created that sense of like, oh, this is, like, really unique and I think it's really hard to create that like magical realism feeling, right?

That's a very difficult vibe to hit most games, I think, either swing towards realism or magical, but they managed to thread it right in the middle. Yeah, you don't, you didn't see a lot of games that kind of went macro like this. Like they tried to present sort of the real world at scale. You know, like before Halo, Bungi made Oni a martial arts action game, heavily influenced by manga and anime, but for some reason they got the elf quest people to design the characters and they're not Japanese. Anyway, the kind of big gimmick for that was like, hey, we're going to create real spaces. Like we're having real industrial architects and interior designers design our levels for us. So they'll function like real world spaces. And it turns out that's incredibly boring. But that's what everyone was trying to do was was trying to, like it's just. not fun, it's not fun play spaces. You need, you know, you need to enter a big arena where there's like boxes that you can cover behind, like in Mass Effect, you know, it's, it's kind of

unrealistic and it telegraphs what's going to happen in the space, but it makes for a better game. And so everyone was kind of chasing that, like, let's, let's create the world and let you, you know, run around through this huge world. I mean, this game came out like two months after Grant Theft Auto 3, okay? So that's, or Shin Mu, you know, that's the kind of thing people we're going for. And this said, let's create an extraordinarily tiny slice of the real world and then zoom in really closely. We're going to, you know, do the Chippendale Rescue Rangers thing or, um, micro machines or whatever. Something you don't really see that often in video games where it's just like here are, here, here's the real world, but, you know, the scale of things

is totally different and it gives you a completely different perspective. And we can focus on something besides like making big rooms with you know doors that are twice the size of your character because perspectives and proportions are weird and it's just like here's like basically someone's backyard and you're having an adventure against you know ravenous ladybugs and it's amazing and it helps that it feels alive too like the systems in the game all interact together in like kind of a natural way and so it gives uh like almost credibility to the world. Like, it feels like this space is alive. And I think it's funny that the trend of gaming, like you said, to be more realistic or lived in space. Like, I think in some ways, the FMVness,

that whole era of we need things to be real. Like, real is what we want. People want these to be interactive movies or something. Like, we realized that was dumb. But then polygonal graphics was like, well, now we can just build whatever we. need. And they were still sort of missing the point there. It's not necessarily. You want to make someone feel like they're in that space and not just show them a spell, almost like show don't tell kind of thing. I mean, the design style, like art design wise of it is, is always in Rapture me because it does feel like, you know, you're watching one of those National Geographic documentaries we saw as kids of like, here's, here's super, super, super close up on like,

Ants fighting a bee, and you just, because they're not human, they're not, you know, mammals, you see them tear each other apart, and it makes you feel uncomfortable, but you're also like, well, I'm watching nature, you know? It's like, that's, that's kind of how it feels in this game. Like, it's, it's one of the most, like, violent games, Miyamoto has ever had his name attached to, but because, and I think it's this, it's both that it's the, you know, this insect world, or insect, like this very close-up world, that it gets away with it, but also that characters have big googly eyes on them a lot of the time. And you're just like, well, look at this silly

goofball. Oh, is this soul escape from him? Oh, well, I killed that. Everything has a death knell. Yes. I would love to know at what point in that design process, Miyamoto committed to that element of the game because the, they were working closely with rare at that point. But the whole thing with Miamodo and his gardening is, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's based off of, like, the, the whole thing with Miyamoto and his gardening is, I think it's based off of, like, the, the, 30 to 60 seconds of stuff he said about it on stage at E3. And so, like, that gets brought up a lot. But I think there's not much out there in terms of interviews with the devs about how

Pickman 1 got made. Like, at some point, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but the Pickman were going to be like the size of cats and that was going to be the scale of things. But I think that the gardening just gave him an idea of what to shoot for as. as far as how small or large to make the world. You know, like with any Nintendo game, they spent a while trying to figure out how it should feel and what it should be and let the purpose of the game kind of come to them

as they played with it for a while. So, yeah. Yeah, the story of Miyamoto basing this game on his hobbies is one that gets thrown around a lot. And supposedly, you know, Henry mentioned bees fighting ants. And supposedly that was actually kind of the inspiration was just watching lines of ants and him thinking, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to control like these ants to, you know, to be able to interact with them. But, but also apparently I was reading on this, you know, to do the research for this episode, there's also a claim that this game was going to be about God helping Adam and Eve that started in the Garden of Eden, which. child. Was that also a hobby? He was, you know, studying for the clergy. He spent some time at

seminary and it was like, I'm going to make a game based on this. I don't know. It's interesting that those are like two wildly contradicting ideas, but both of them have been kind of put out as the beginning of Pickman. It almost sounds like they just made a simulation and kind of watched it for a couple months just to watch something. But they couldn't figure out, at least from this story. I think they said it was from an interview with some Nintendo outfit in Brazil. I don't know. But it's poorly translated if it's real. And yeah, would he have been paying attention to like God games at this point? It's possible. I mean, Sims was on in Super Nintendo. Like, he worked with Will Wright on that kind of stuff. So I mean, I think that's interesting that,

you know, God Game Sim type things and RTS games, like both were, didn't have a Nintendo franchise to that point. Like, it was both genres they hadn't really played around with. And so I could see Pickman is like their answer to that too. Like, oh, this is unexplored territory for Nintendo as an internal developer. Like, well, what's our stamp on this kind of genre? Yeah, you mentioned SimCity, but I would say a closer and more. more direct antecedent to this game on a Nintendo system would be from around the same period, which was populace. The only game that I can really think of that comes to mind that has the sort of, like,

you are leading followers, you know, across the landscape and building stuff, well, it was really populace. And, yeah, I could definitely see, given that that was an early Super NES title, where that would have had some influence. You also had, like, Act Razor, which isn't, anything like this, but, you know, definitely Nintendo at the launch of Super NES, as you can see in my book, Super NES works, volume one, sitting there on the coffee table. Like, that was kind of a thing at the beginning of the Super NES era.

So, you know, that stuff sticks in the memory. And the Sims was growing and becoming popular around the same time. But also, there is another sort of line of influence on the creation of Pikmin, and that's Mario, specifically the Mario 128 demo that Nintendo showed in the N64 era as, you know, it was touted

as I think people expected it to be the sequel to Super Mario 64, because what happens when you add 64 and 64, you get 128, so obviously this is the next, this is the next Mario game. But then the next Mario game was actually Mario Sunshine,

which had nothing to do with 128 Mario's running around and jump And really, Pikmin doesn't either. But, you know, the idea of having all these independently controlled objects, you can have up to 100 Pikmin out active at a time, which is getting pretty close to 128. So, you know, it's, it's, you kind of get the sense of like how that tech demo and the idea of like, hey, you've got all these Marios, what do you do with them? Well, maybe you like, you can't play each of them at a time.

Maybe you control them sort of in a group. and influence their controls and give them sort of indirect controls or commands and see how they act, how that would sort of migrate over to something that's not Mario, and maybe Mario's just in control, and maybe he's got like gumbas or something that he's controlling. But that doesn't make any sense. Why would Mario be controlling gumbas? Maybe it should be like, you know, some other character. His name should be really similar to Mario.

Maybe we could make his name Mario backward. Oh, Rima. That sounds good. Yeah. So let's do that. So you end up with Olamar and Pickman, who kind of have the same scale and, you know, relationship to each other as Mario and Gumbas. But it's something totally different in a completely different setting. It's science fiction, yet deeply grounded in, like, real world visuals.

And, you know, like you are, like I said, in someone's backyard or, you know, in a creek back behind someone's house or something. And, yeah, like all these things kind of come together. the god game and ants and Mario 128 and Adam and Eve and then you have pigmen. I feel like those, uh, the kind of the first creatures you come across or some of the main ones you fight that kind of look like little ladybugs, but with the googly eyes, they have big gumumba energy. Like those are, those are gumbas with a paint job, you know? Right. And, um, some of the pickmen, you know, when they sprout, they grow leaves, kind of like Adam and Eve wore fig leaves to cover their shame once they ate from the tree of knowledge.

I think you cracked it, John. We've solved the Da Vinci Code, move over. That's an excellent reading. Pickman have no shame. It's true. They wear their leaves in the wrong place. They're not covering anything. Also, the Pickman name, I remember in those same early 2001 promotional things for it.

Like, they made sure to say, like, they had an integration. question it like is this related to Pokemon because the name is so similar sounding i had to go like this is nothing to do with Pokemon like i i wonder like how long miamoto had pickman in mind or whoever came up with it they're like should we use this it really sounds like pokema yeah they should be careful with those consonants uh especially in like the late 90s you know i was i was having a conversation i want to say with bill trinnon a long long time ago it was someone somewhat at Nintendo Treehouse at some Nintendo event up in Seattle

and he mentioned that like the original name for Pickman was going to be Pick Pick Pick the Vegetal Man and I don't know like I have seen that elsewhere online you know so there must be some truth to it but

but yeah I guess they they combined pick pick the vegetable vegetable not vegetable vegetable man just down to pick man pick men so So was Olimar, was he the vegetal man or are the pickmen themselves each a vegetable man? I don't know. Pick-pick was the vegetal man.

Pick-pick, okay. Well, pick-pick's the name of the, uh, the, a brand of carrots from the game's, you know, universe or lore. So that's what he names them after, his favorite carrot brand. Planet Hocketate, where Al-A-Mar has crash landed from. So anyway, that's what we know about the origins of Pickman. If I could make one more guess, wild guess at where it came from, I do think that Miyamoto, you know, during the development of this game, since it was a GameCube launch game between, you know, N64's launch and GameCube,

he had ascended above like single game director or even like one studio director. He was like the president of the whole thing. So I do wonder if partially this game about managing a giant collective of characters comes from his new level of management that he went to from in the late 90s. Yeah, you know, and you do have that boss named Kuduragi. So you just throw Nintendo employees at them and they die until you finally kill Kudoran. They're like, ah, there'll be three more where they came from. It's all making sense now.

Wow. Wow. There's a really interesting interview with a developer named Matoi Okamoto, who the interview is actually by Chris Kohler, you know, friend of that guy. Friend of the show, yeah, from a few years ago. And he worked, Pickman was one of the first games he worked on at Nintendo after joining the company at a pretty young age. And he didn't talk a lot about the ideas behind the game,

but he had a really interesting quote, which was Miyamoto saying, the next Mario is Pickman. And then kind of his whole, he talked about Miyamoto's sort of like, his philosophy while making this game was trying to decide on the balance between sort of classic, you know,

game system mechanics and like just the idea of play. and, like, art games that he was seeing at the time, like Doshin the Giant, which was, I think, still in development, and Cubevore, which is another very weird, tiny animal game that came out on the GameCube. And so he was trying to decide, you know, now we know where the RTS elements came from. That was him going, well, this game needs to, people need to see it, and it needs to make sense to them, and they need to be able to, you know, engage with it like a video game. But he also had this idea of sort of just a place where you can go and interpret. interact without, you know, kind of hard, hard guidance to what you're supposed to be doing

and just enjoy the space. And, you know, around the same time, Nintendo published Animal Crossing, Animal Forest for N64, like, at the very, very end of the N64's life, I think it was like fall 2001. So pretty much the same time as this. Yeah. And that's a different kind of game, but there's still something, there's some sort of spiritual connection, I think, between Animal Crossing and Pickman, and they're

not by the same teams. Like, Miyamoto never promotes Animal Crossing. I don't know that he was really ever that involved in the series development. It's, you know, kind of a different group. It's not something that he's had a whole lot of direct involvement in, from my understanding. But, yeah,

it's like a different group, kicking around the same ideas. You know, there's just something kind of floating in the water. And you also had, you know, talk about mother three at the time. That was going to be on n64 d and you're going to be able to plant an acorn and over time it would grow and you know just the idea of nurturing and persistence and like creating something in a simulation view in the form of a genre you know in the rapper of a genre that didn't really have anything to do

with that style of game with that that style of mechanic so yeah it was just uh you know something that it was in the drinking water, you know, the water cooler at the office, and everyone all kind of drink from that font of inspiration. I appreciate they had that push-pull because, I mean, this is still a thing in gaming now, but I think especially at that time, the idea of the technology was hyped up so much. You know, it was like, we can do, you know, 10,000 more polygons on screen a second and all this kind of stuff. And then you had at the other end of that, you had the animal crossings where it was like,

what if we just simulated life and you could just live? What if you wrote letters to your animal friends? Well, the graphical power of it is on the GameCube, though. It's like really, it's subtler. Like, the stuff it does, you could never do it on any system before it, but it doesn't, it didn't showcase the way, like, Metal Gear Solid 2 with raindrops blasting off of shoulders. You're like, whoa, look at that. You could shoot ice cubes and then come back five minutes later, and they're melted.

Yeah, or shooting a watermelon or whatever. But meanwhile, like, I would point, I could point to my friends like, look how much that looks like a Dura cell battery. Come on. Like, how do they not have to pay for the brand rights? Yeah, I was in full fanboy mode in these years. I think, like, the Nintendo Sega years, I was like, they're both fun. Sega's, Sega's so bad.

But I, for some reason, I got real bitter at Sony for a little bit of my childhood. And I was like, no, guys, the game keeps the best. Look, look how great this looks. No, I felt the pain also at the job I worked of telling people who were just like, hey, GTA is so cool. They were all talking about games. And then when I was like, yeah, let's talk games, you know. Even going like with Smash, they're like, what?

Yeah, no. Dork stuff. And Pickman, too, like what you said there of how Miyamoto was saying internally, the next Mario is Pickman, I do wonder how he feels that it wasn't or like that it was never of real success. Like not certainly not like Mario. I think it finally saw success last year when Pickman 3 Deluxe came to switch. But, you know, I do want to get to that comment about Pickman being the next Mario because, you know, just as we never got a Super Mario Brothers 4 here in America, we've also never gotten a Pickman for. All right. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. That was my

bit. No, but Pickman kind of had the same relationship to the GameCube hardware that Mario 64 had to the N64 hardware in that the controller is really perfectly suited and seems totally designed around playing Pickman and maybe not much of anything else. I guess, unless you talk to a melee fanatic. I think other Mario Sunshine with the shoulder buttons.

Smash doesn't feel right to me unless I have a GameCube controller in my hand. Even now, in 20 years later, it's like, can we put the adapter into the switch, please? I want to play with the GameCube Controlers. But, yeah, I mean, it feels very perfect for Pickman, which is then funny because, like, then by the time the remake of it, or the Wii version of Pickman 1 came out, I was like, yeah, this might work better. I think I actually like pointing with the wand and the Nunchuk to the GameCube controller. Yeah, there were several GameCube series that came to Wii and actually worked better on Wii.

And Metroid Prime and Pygman were the big two. Like both of those having the motion controls, the pointer, that really changed how the game plays. And I kind of wonder if they've been so slow to release Pickman 4, which, you know, Pikmin 3 came out eight years ago now, just because they can't really come up with a way that, you know, a design, a concept that really harnesses the switch's capabilities in a way that's as satisfying as the Wii pointer or the Wii U pad for Pikmin 3 or even the GameCube controller. Like, you know, the switch has the potential for you to do motion controls,

but then they also release the switch light, which does not have the potential to do motion controls because that's just nonsense. Yeah. So they can't really rely on the JoyCon as, pointer device concept for game design anymore. So I don't know. I feel like they're kind of struggling to figure out what to do with Pickman 4 just in terms

of, you know, like how does it express the best of what the series is, live up to its predecessors, and also maximize the switch. It's kind of wild to think that when Pickman came out, the sort of the way we understood you typically use a game pad in a 3D game still wasn't really. notified. And so Pickman used the, the C stick. If I remember right, you could kind of direct your Pickman, sort of in a weird, you know, just push them in this direction and kind of make the move like a wave. And I was just playing Pickman 3 last night before we record the podcast and noticed that the right stick now does the sort of understood traditional move the camera,

you know, yeah, yeah, in 360 degrees. And I was like, hmm, this feels sort of a little wrong to me in my, I haven't played Pickman in many years, but I sort of have this. like built-in sense memory of how you can move the Pickman with that stick and you can't do that. I absolutely agree with that. Yeah. I had to unlearn it when I started playing Deluxe. And I eventually did. And I mean, I do love being able to move the camera with the second stick as my brain also thinks. But I had to pretty much unlearn everything I learned from, from Classic Pickman.

Yes. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I don't know what I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. So actually, So,

So, So, So, So, so, why don't we talk about how the game plays? We've kind of given a

general overview of the fact that it's, you know, like a macro view game where you control an alien astronaut who's like three inches tall. But his, you control Olamar, but he doesn't really do that much in the game. I kind of feel like in a way this precedes, you know, games like Dota and other mobas where you have like the hero unit and then you have all the sort of subordinate units that you're issuing commands to. And it's kind of like a strategy game from the hero's perspective. And that was a big change for RTS games. Because everything up to that point was you're just, you know, the guy in the sky with

50 little tanks and men you can control with a mouse cursor. And so we get to the act razor thing again where you come down from the sky, you manifest in the flesh as Olamar. And then you bark your commands directly instead of just, you know, issuing them from above by radio or whatever. But yeah, it was pretty different. Like I said, populace kind of did that. But again, even there, you were still pretty much God.

And you were, like, reshaping the land and things. And you would lead your armies around. But you weren't directly controlling an avatar in the game. They were just kind of doing stuff for you. Whereas this actually puts you down there, you know, with your, with your legion. But Olomar, even though he has unique abilities and he does have the ability to defend himself somewhat, but it's pretty easy to get him into hot water if you don't keep him away from, especially like bosses. He has to kind of hover at the periphery and oversee, you know, the things that are happening and issue commands that the Pickman who, you know, kind of collectively have much more power than he does.

And so, you know, he's, he's unique, but he's also uniquely vulnerable in that, you know, if you lose 100 Pickman, well, that sucks, you got to go get more Pickman. But if you lose Olamar, that sucks because the game's over. You've got to start again. And you wasted a day, right? And we haven't really talked too much about the structure of the game, but losing a day is a big deal. And it comes with the guilt of, I think, all your pickmen who were following you die. And so if you get, if you're stupid and get yourself knocked out, you just wasted the lives of, you know, 75 pickmen or something. And it hurts.

It's very likely that they were all of the pickmen with. flowers that you had. They were your top tier. So you might have some buds in the onion, but, you know. It's a massive setback. So I don't know if we should talk about Ollamar first or the Pickman. Why, like Olimar as a character, like he's, you know, a work-a-day guy. Like, he's just, you know, he's basically a plunder of space, really, because he is like, oh, I owe a lot of money or my company's going to, their problems so much of the time are just like, this thing's broke, I got to fix it, or my company is a gigantic clean debt, or in three, it's like, my planet is starving. We got to go somewhere and harvest their food.

He's just like a, he's a truck driver, right? Yeah. Does each Pikmin game represent like a concrete stage of capitalism? I feel like you could probably map that out between. Maybe. I think it's more an indication of what was happening with Nintendo at the time. Like, you know, Pikmin 1 stuff's broken and you got to fix it. Pickman 2, it's a desperate struggle to make a profit. And that was right after Nintendo had announced like... We need everything we can as fast as possible. Yeah, that was right after Nintendo had announced its like first ever quarterly losses.

And since they entered the video game market. So, yeah. No, I mean, thematically you have like, well, this is a launch game for the code name dolphin. And the game starts with the S.F. Dolphin crashing. And you're like, ah, shit. You got to rebuild the dolphin. It's in trouble.

They saw it coming. All right. So we'll talk about Olamar then. I said that he was unique and had unique capabilities and is uniquely vulnerable. But he basically has three ways to interact with pickman. He can pluck or throw them because pickmen are plants. So he plucks them out of the ground. And they're also small.

So he throws them. And they don't seem to mind. They just follow them around. They imprint on him. and they're just like, you know, do whatever you want to as dad. It's fine. We're your little vegetable sons. We'll take anything that you throw us at.

Yes, base daddy. Yeah, I don't want to get into the whole daddy thing. That changes the dynamic. So, yeah, basically you come across Pickman that are growing in the ground or have somehow been slammed back into the ground, as some enemies can do. And you use the gigantic. button on the GameCube to stand near them

and contextually take the action to pull them out of the ground and then they follow you around like a little puppy. Oh, that pluck sound is like one of the most satisfying sounds in a game to be. It's like a cork pop. And the hello noise that each Pickman yells

as they greet you. They're like, oh, I was just born. Hello. I'm ready to die for you. Even though I am new in the world. but he can also throw them and you use you use the cursor with the left stick,

not the right stick interestingly enough to kind of target where you want to throw them and you'll toss them and you can toss them a certain height and distance and it kind of varies

according to the type of pigment you have and then basically they'll land and do whatever they need to based on you know kind of what the situation is where you throw them to yeah what's nearby them Your other action you can take is to summon them, and your main action when you are not holding a pickman is to blow a whistle, and that calls the pickman into action.

And they'll take different actions depending on, you know, again, the situation, there's a lot that's context based in this game. And I think that's something people really, I think it's something about the game that goes underappreciated is the fact that it's so contextual. They took that, you know, the action button in Occurion of Time and just applied it to the entire world. Like, everything here is really kind of like, hey, the Pikmin will kind of figure out what they need to do. You just get them into the right place and, you know, organize the battalion properly. There's a real elegance to that the way you can really easily just intuit, like, okay, if I put a certain number of Red Pickman on this object that they're going to carry somewhere, you know, if the ratio is higher for, one color than the other, they'll take it to their pod. If it's the other way around, they'll take it there.

If I throw them at a wall, they're going to attack it. I don't really remember having many experiences in that game being frustrated by what was happening based on what I had done. It all kind of just worked. Yeah, it's also probably a good

game to play if you don't speak the language of the version you bought or whatever. Most of it could be conveyed to you if you just play it long enough. Well, and too, because that helps to like the alienness of the world you're in because like, you know, Olamar

doesn't speak the same language as a Pikman. It's just all this like nonverbal communication and it comes through in the design so well. Like the whistle is another of my just favorite just like bits in the game because it you know, it makes sense to

it feels pretty universal. Like you understand like say in the military or if you were a kid in school you had a teacher that told you like, Everybody here, like, if they didn't have a whistle, they had something to get your attention. And it perfectly makes it like, yeah, the pickmen are your little school children. You're like, kids, come here. And the intensity that you, sorry, I last my thought on it is like the intensity you hold down the B button.

When the whistle keeps going longer, like the way the lights on screen show like there's extra stress of like, seriously, you're blowing this whistle so hard. I love that. I think it's from one of the Nintendo Power issues. I pulled a bunch of them just to see if there was anything, and there's not a whole lot. But

I think it comes from one of those issues where he said, Miyamoto said he put the whistle in there and they took it out for a little while, but he fought to get it back in because he's like, I think it will come across to everyone just what it means. It's to round up your forces. I think the team, I guess,

maybe had some reservation about that being a universal thing, and he fought for it, I guess. He was right. Yeah. And I love that in the character model of Olamar and all the later leader characters, they all have to have a whistle put into their, you know, 1960s spaceman helmet. Like, there's a whistle in the front. Like, I also just love, yeah, it's like a real space age kind of design of the characters. Like, I mean, Miamoto's a boomer. like he grew up in the space race era.

And so Olamar and all the other human characters in it have these like ancient style of spaceman outfits, you know. Well, and then the in the next game where you get a second person and they use the whistle to kind of show that they're kind of a doofy idiot and they give them a wooden train choo-choo whistle. I love that. I love this is number two we're talking about. but I love that they make Louis this idiot

and only is a way of like they're still making fun of Luigi in another game they're like, well yeah, the Olomar's idiot friend would be Louis a guy with an L Dame who's like taller or in. Such disrespect. This is the next Mario game so yeah.

All right, so the other command that Olamar can issue, the other interaction he has, is to make them swarm, just gather together en masse, and do stuff. And again, it's contextual. If they need to kill something, then they will just happily tear into that creature. And, you know, there's ways you can cause them to go after vulnerable spots. You're like, you know, go for the throat or go for the eyeball or go to the weak spot where Gregor Samsa got hit with the apple, like kill that. And, you know, if they need to break down a wall, they'll just stand there and smash that, that rock wall with their heads until it falls. If they need to carry something, they'll pick it up. And, you know, if it needs to be carried by a lot of pickmen, they'll just kind of patiently wait there until more pickmen.

help them, you know, they just, they're not very smart, but they're very sort of, I don't know, they can just kind of figure it out in the moment. They get what you're trying to tell them to do. And it's very rare in my experience with the Pikmin games to, you know, to have these sort of conflicting command spaces where you want them to do one thing, but they keep doing the wrong thing. I mean, occasionally it'll happen. But I think the world design, the level designs, I hate to call it levels because they're not really levels. It's the world. The world design is just so well structured and objectives and hazards and obstacles are all placed so thoughtfully that there is this kind of separation between them. And so when you send your pickman, you know, to do things

indirectly for you, they just do it. And so it really minimizes the frustration of trying to make these complicated things happen with a hundred little characters following your commands, they just do what they need to. Swarming was probably also the easiest way to get yourself in trouble, not because the pickman didn't follow your commands, or because maybe you weren't always giving them a great command, like accidentally sending 40 of your red pickman off a bridge into the water where they then drowned while screaming for your help.

Or when you thought you had your yellow, your red, red ones chosen, but you actually had the yellow ones chosen and you send them towards a fire breathing enemy who just roast them instantly. And you just see all these yellow souls go up to Kevin and you're like, God, I'm a monster. That's going to psychically damage me for the next 20 years. No, literally, I, I beat one. And when two came out in 2004, I got five hours in And I did that and killed like 40 Yellow Pickman. And I seriously did just go like, eh, I'll play some mouth. Broken, spirit broken.

I mean, that is definitely a turn of events where you're like, yeah, it's time to reset the system. I can't let this happen. God can't know I did this. I have to be a better God than this. I'm always wary of the Yellow Pickman in this game because sometimes they're holding bombs. And so if you, depending on what state of rest they're in, sometimes when you call them over with the whistle, they will come over with their bomb.

And sometimes they'll just drop them and kill all the Pickman standing around them. And so, like, you have to be real careful with the bomb guys. But for the most part, like the swarming, it's like probably my favorite verb in the game is the C-stick. I love using that thing to kill things or interact, you know, or just go completely into battle without thinking. Just, I've got a hundred pickman and I've got a C-stick. I can make it. Yeah, I feel like they didn't really want the right analog stick on the GameCube controller

to be just like, you know, a typical analog controller. And this game really kind of expresses that where you're not controlling the camera with it. You're performing specific commands and doing certain functions. They wanted it to be something other than just like, this is, you know, this makes the camera swing around, which is pretty much what it was on. you know, PlayStation Dual Analog games and PlayStation 2 games and was going to be on Xbox. But that's not what most people wanted, so that's what they moved away from.

But I feel like it also was a natural evolution of the N64 controller going from the C buttons. Yeah, maybe it's the same yellow as the C buttons for a reason. Exactly, yeah. Was C supposed to mean camera? Camera, I think. Okay. So they were kind of like sort of admitting that this is probably what it's going to be used for, but like you say, they definitely wanted they were you know they aspired to it to it being more than just that yeah and they they sort of settled into the uh i think the way that nintendo was comfortable dealing with the camera was to have a button to shift it to your back um by the end of the n64's life and yeah even the even the right or the left analog stick in uh on the game cube resembles the n64's uh analog stick

And so I don't think they didn't make a dual stick controller because they thought that's what we should do now. I think that was just it naturally came out. I always assumed seeing the system before it launched that that control stick would click down and then you could in a Zelda game select your weapon and then click the C-stick to use the weapon and was surprised when it didn't click at all.

Yeah, I think we're getting kind of into the weeds here, but I feel like, you know, when they created the N64 controller, they put the C stick or the C buttons in there because it's going to be the camera and how you control the camera and you see Mario 64 and that's exactly what happens. But because they didn't put a stick in there, it was buttons, people used those buttons for other purposes. And when it came time for the GameCube to roll around, they were like, well, you know, having this kind of button paradigm here is much. more interesting than just having like a camera maneuvering thing. So let's, you know, let's just call it C. And hopefully it'll be more than just swinging the camera around. But then that's all it ended up being for most people, except, you know, like Metroid Prime and Pickman. Or Spash Brothers. True. There's no camera. Easy Smash Brothers. Yep. Yeah, but you shouldn't get caught using the C-stick and people I played with. They would, they would roast you.

I, I told my friends to deal with that. I was like, you know what? I'm using the C-stick. So in addition to the C-STIC. So in addition to the commands we've talked about, Olamar can also take sort of nuanced actions. like you can sort or cycle through different kinds of pickmen and you know you have the ability to very quickly separate them by color or if you pick one up that isn't right you know the right for your purposes you can tap a button and it'll just kind of instantly replace it with the next

pigment available that's you know kind of the the alternate rank so I guess at this point we should talk about colors and ranks because talking about like segregating them by color sounds really bad when you just say it like that and it's not that kind of game. Discussing this game is weird when you get into it. I've been streaming it a lot lately and it just

it feels uncomfortable sometimes when I'm describing my actions. Think of it like the military. It's just like you know that platoon in that Star Trek. You've got command gold. You've got sciences and you've got operations red. It's a little scary.

And the red shirts do die a lot, especially if you're near water. Well, they're the muscle. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, it's very much about, like, function as opposed to, like, their genetics. So, yeah, there's basically, in this game, essentially three colors of pigment. There's red, blue, and yellow. You're just going with the primaries, nice and simple.

But each of them has its own capabilities. Each of them looks a little different than the others. And each of them has their own sort of weakness. Do you guys have a favorite? I mean, they're all pretty similar looking, but I guess I like the ears on the yellow ones. Those are my favorite. They're little big ears. And I'm glad I get why each game after this, they're like, well, you have to have a new

pigment type that's how you know it's a sequel or you can add in all this new, you know, design stuff to it. But the simplicity of just yellow, blue, red, that's your three pickmen to deal with. Like, I prefer, I really like that. Even though my favorite pickman is like the rock pickman from, from three, like just design rise. It's just so cool looking. But, yeah, I guess I have to pick one.

I go with yellow just because your ears are cute. I think in the first game, it's blue for me after I had a water incident. I never felt quite fully comfortable with my red and yellow pickman with me. But the blue pickman, I was like, they can then go swim in. no problem. Overall in the series, I love the purple pickman from from Pickman too, just the heavy thud pickman that you would throw at a wall to break it. I think they counted the weight of like 10 pickman or something like that. They were fun. Yeah, not to make this whole color thing sound worse than it already is, but I really like the white pigment because they're so weird and

so kind of creepy. They're like poison, right? Yeah, they're immune to poison. And then if enemies eat them, enemies get sick and die because they are poisoned. But they're like tiny and they have these weird red eyes. They're kind of albino, but it's, yeah, they're just, they're just a little, like, they look offbeat compared to all the other pickmen. Well, they're like weak too. Like they're sickly. Yeah.

Yeah, which, but they can do all this stuff the other guys can't. Like, yeah. Yeah, I guess I've always been kind of partial to blue for, I mean, I'm kind of water element Pokemon or, you know, I tend to lean toward that kind of stuff in games where that's like a choice or whatever. But also, blue is just, it's relaxing because they won't drown. You can really move almost anywhere and still feel okay. Hell yeah. Just don't get electrocuted. Yeah. Or caught on fire. I also love the yellow guys, the little dance they do when they complete a wire or they complete an electric current. Like, I like that animation a lot. All right. So the red,

Pickman are strong. They're like, I think Henry said, they're the muscle. And they're immune to fire, like Henry said. The blue are not immune to fire, but they are immune to water. Any pickmen will drown if you put it in water. But the blue do not drown. And what I really like about them is that if they are near a pickman of another color that's drowning, they're team players and they will pull those pickmen out and save them to keep them from drowning.

I did not remember that. Which is not something I, you don't see. often. I can't, I only think of having seen it once or twice, but when I was, you know, refreshing my memory, I was like, oh yeah, reading about this game. I was like, I do remember seeing that and it's, you know, kind of an edge case. But again, it's that, that sort of contextual action that's been programmed into them. It's something you wouldn't have time to tell them, hey, go save those guys, but they just take care of it automatically. And then the yellow are interesting because they are, I guess their ears are like parasails. So when you throw

them, they can fly higher and they take longer to land. And also they carry bombs. And also they carry bombs, which, as Brian mentioned, can be very dangerous, but also very handy. Like when you send a yellow out to be just, you know, carry a bomb into the thick of a group of enemies. And I don't know how to say this, so it doesn't sound really bad. But, yeah, like, just take one for the team, I guess. We salute your sacrifice, yellow picnic. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. You will be remembered forever. Except they won't because they don't have names. They're just little yellow guys. But, yeah, I mean, just like real-life dynamite, you know, it can be useful as a tool, but you can't use, it's nothing to play with, you know, it's dangerous. That's right. Just ask Mr. Arst. So, in addition to the color divisions, there's also three levels of maturity for Pikmin.

And, okay, so I guess at this point we should explain sort of the life cycle of a Pikmin about how they are not born from a mother. they are born from an onion and an onion is like a tiny spaceship that is also a plant with very long spindly legs that sort of its landing gear their life cycle is a little bit like the xenomorph from the aliens movie in that it involves like multiple creatures and phases like the onion is kind of the egg and the facehugger and then the pickman I guess is like the actual xenomorph and the facehugger just like exists to impregnate a person and die and the onion is just there to like spawn pickman. But at no point do you see a pickman grow into an onion.

Is the onion alive itself? I don't know. There's much of the scene that is not explaining. It seems to be in the third one. Yeah. It's they kind of animated a little more. And it's a little unsettling when its legs come out. I also like they kind of almost leave like a crop circle type thing.

Like, it feels like, you know, it's a UFO landing every time it does it, which I just love. And, yeah, the little, I mean, they are like spores, like, or like, you know, from dandelion or whatever, just flying off. They just float down to the ground. You know, Alamar assumes that the pickman are native to the planet he discovers them on, but what if they're an invasive species just like the alien? I mean, who knows where they're that onions from? Well, who knows what they're keeping down? I mean, they seem to exist to kill the. native fauna of a planet

and then turn it into more pygman so that certainly is how you describe a you know Yeah I mean They don't seem to know how effective they could be though Right You need a strong leader to express their power This world is very clearly like the human

world probably like Japan But you never see humans It seems to be after an apocalypse So are pygman like What caused humanity's extinction Like there's there's a lot of questions and when you really start to look at this the series, it kind of makes you a little uncomfortable. Anyway, so basically, the onion is, it's kind of like a UFO on spindly legs, like a spider that flies, and it has kind of, you know, a UFO beam to it. So the pickman, when they get resources, like food resources, they will take it back to the onion and drop it beneath the onion and then it will beam that resource up with its UFO tractor beam and absorb it and then spit out little baby pickman like little seeds.

And those will flutter down to the ground and they'll plant and then the next day you can come. Actually, it doesn't even take that long. It's pretty quick. You can pluck them right away. but if you wait longer, then they will mature. So if you wait like two days, they'll be fully matured as opposed to just little buds. And there is a... I think it's only like half a day to get a full flower.

Oh, is it? Yeah. I think it's a quarter day amount for each upgrade. But it's slow enough that you don't want to just hang around because you do have a time limit. So you can't just be like, I'm just going to kill some hours here. Was that Henry? No, I would just say, boy, do you have a time limit in this game? Yeah. So, you know, there is there is the potential to just immediately pluck the

pickmen that are planted. And if you're really low on, on, you know, your numbers, that might be the way to go. But if not, then it's good to kind of let them mature and ripen, I guess. And you have ways to make Pikmin mature in the field. Like if they find nectar just sitting around, they'll automatically run over to it and drink it. And that will cause them to basically level up. But, but, you know, the different levels, there's, um, what are they? Leaf, Bud and Bloom, uh, those, those represent different levels of strength. So like, leaf is basically a baby and it is slow and weak and kind of stupid like a baby. Whereas Bloom is, you know, athletic prime. It's, you know, fast, powerful, smart, we'll take

actions and execute them quickly. They don't fall behind. Right. Yes. And that's always a big problem is like you're leading your little army around and the slow ones lag behind. And if they lag far enough behind, they just kind of stop. They're like, well, we give up. We don't know what's happening. And so then you have to, yeah, you have to waste time hunting them down and trying to find them. So am I misremembering or could the, could the blooms on like the yellow and the blue pickmen? Could they get burned off if they, if they caught on fire, would they like de-level? yeah they can get uh or or hit really hard by an enemy or a boss or something like that and uh yeah the pedals are just gone yeah yeah if they go through something crazy yeah also they they i think

in that instance that's what causes them to plant new pickman where like uh and during a crazy battle uh if they die or or you know get get hurt or something like that oh that explains that was in the first game getting getting hit so hard that you have to go through puberty again That's quite a punch. I suppose the Pikmin are deflowered in a way. Oh, no. I'm sorry. It's more like they're reflowered, though.

I don't know where we're going with that. All right. There's just, yeah, this whole, like, nature documentary thing, it really leads to some weird and uncomfortable conversations. But basically, the Pikmin, like, they are kind of the stars of the game, even though you control Olamar. You spend all your time, like, caring for your pickman, trying to grow new, ones, trying to mature the ones you have, trying to protect the ones that are out with

you, you know, putting whatever extra you can sprout into reserve and the onions so that they'll be safe. And yeah, it's really, it is a resource management game. And the Pikman themselves are probably the biggest resource you have. Like, they're the most important by far. You know, I bet at some point when they were working on the design, that they probably let Alamar carry at least some objects in the world. world or interact with something. And I'm sure it was a very deliberate choice to go, no, we are not going to let him do basically anything except control the pickman. You can see you can like headbut stuff, right? And that's about it. If you're really desperate and all of your pickmen are

doing a certain task and you can have him help knock his head up against the wall and do little bits, but it's not going to get you very far. Yeah. And if like a bulb orb is like the small ones are coming after your pickman and making a mess of things, you can run in and like headbut a bulb orb and that'll, you know, either make it stop or even kill it, uh, depending on the size and how, how weak it is. But it's desperate because, yeah, you have, you have a very limited amount of health and they can, they can hit you back. When the limited scope of Olmar really helps the too with the resource management thing because, you know, they're, it's, you do have the resources like just your number of

Pikmin and also it's like well you better collect these items to rebuild the ship and of course you can kill guys and then consume them to make more Pikmin but it's not like in you know contemporary RTSs from the time where it's like well I better keep checking on my gold farms or

on that one big project in town and also you can't you know because you're always with Olmar you can't zoom out all the way it's something the later games you know two and then three even more so where you can have your different parties of like, okay, what's going on over there?

Those guys were building a bridge while I was doing this. Oh, the bridge is done, Mike. But in one, you're just very focused on your one group through Olamar's viewpoint. And you do have the ability to kind of set them to different tasks and statuses. You can have Pickman wait in a place for a while, which, you know, you want to be sure it's a safe place before you do that because otherwise enemies will find them and just devour. them while you're like, oh, wow, I just lost a lot of Pickman and I don't know why.

But you can kind of put them in a neutral position. And, you know, if they complete a task or something changes that they don't know how to deal with, then they'll enter that neutral position. So you kind of have to keep an eye on where they are. But, you know, you spend time kind of delegating tasks according to the Pickman's abilities. But also, you know, when you send food resources back to the onions, you want. to kind of look and see which type of pickmen do I eat the most of because the color of pickman that carry the food resources back to the onion determines the kind of pigment that

are sprouted. So that kind of creates a push and pull also. Like if you're low on a certain type of pickman, you want those that you do have to carry back resources to the onion. But at the same time can you afford to spare the ones you have in your party because you have so few of them you have to make choices like that kind of on the fly yeah also you got to make sure you're not just running around the world randomly and sending pickman back just with stuff because you need it you got to make sure that you have cleared out that path uh keep an eye on which way they take because sometimes they'll they're either a door will be up or they just decide to go that way because they wanted to, but you could be in a position

where you send a bunch of Pickman back with resources and you forgot about one fire dude and he's just lit up all your blue pickman. And that's the end of them. Yep. So there's a lot of kind of a need to keep an eye on things. But at the same time, Pickman does tend to be a sort of leisurely-paced game. It can have its moments of stress and anxiety for sure. But it feels like it's a game that unlike most RTSs is not frantic all the time.

It's not a constant race to build your resources and try to get into that feedback loop before the other player. And that's a function of the fact that it is not a competitive RTS. That kind of would show up as an option, some of the sequels as a bonus mode. but Pickman itself is a, you know, described by Nintendo, but described by Miyamoto, I think, as a, an RTS about cooperation. And you're not cooperating with another player in the first game, but you are cooperating with your teammates, the Pickman themselves. And it's about everyone kind of pulling together and working toward a common task. And that common task, which we haven't really talked about, is finding all the parts of Olamar's ship, the dolphin, which, you know, it crashed and it's scattered all its bits all over the place and you have 30 days to gather

them all repair your ship and leave the planet or else you'll run out of oxygen and die. So there is like this kind of intense background stress of like, wow, I only have X many days and I've still got Y number of parts to find. But it's really more about kind of managing your time and figuring out what the best approach is to venture out into the world and search for resources and how to allocate your your pigment party and so forth. It ends up being really foreboding for a game that otherwise seems very kid-friendly. The further you get into Olamar's adventure, every day he writes this diary entry and the closer you get to the end of your 30-day window, the more he's talking

about missing his kids and his wife and whether he's going to ever see them again. And like, gets pretty dire and you know he's going to try to take off at the end regardless of the state his ship is in and he keeps saying you know well I might be able to to make it out with only some of the ship parts I probably don't need all of them right but I don't think it's ever clear to the player which ones you can you can miss like the game doesn't explicitly tell you that I don't think so there is sort of this potential chance of you launching at the end of the game with, like, maybe you have the parts you need, or maybe you're going to explode as you leave orbit.

After you either successfully escape the planet or hit day 30, it will show you a screen of all of the pieces that you'd found, and there are five, and I believe it denotes in some way that these are the five pieces you may not need, but I think it will only tell you that if you found it and collected it and get to the end. I feel like this is not a game you're meant to finish the first time through. I think, you know, it's kind of understood. They give you multiple endings and it's meant to be sort of an incentive to go back and try again, which is a little bit of an old school concept.

But, you know, I think it works here because it's not a super time-consuming game. You have 30 in-game days and each of them is maybe like 12 to 15 minutes long. So what is that? That's like seven hours, six to seven hours? I think they're 20 minute long, so you get like an even 10 hours maybe. I don't think they're that long. It doesn't feel like they're that long. But what do I know?

Maybe I just get absorbed. They go quickly for sure. Time moves fast. The intensity of the looming deadline definitely stuck with me in the game. And like the, you know, and yeah, I think the localization like Wes was talking about, like, or the script and then well localized. really expresses like that the intensity that this goofy little character is feeling. And then by the end of it, you know, you do, maybe that also feels like kind of a space race

kind of thing like, well, is the Apollo going to make it to the moon or whatever? Ooh, let's watch. And so when you lift off and your rickety rebuild ship, you're like, I hope I got everything. And I think on my first play through, I got a good enough ending. It definitely wasn't the bad ending. I know that, but I think I played through at least one more time. But then eventually I was like, wait, it's the year 2002. I can just look up the best ending on the Internet.

Yeah. Yeah, the endings are pretty dark no matter what happens. If, you know, you get the worst ending, Olamar crashes rather than escaping from the planet. And the pickman take his corpse to the onion and feed him to the onion. And then he sprouts an Olamar Pickman with like a Pikman body and an Olamar head. which like it's it's really kind of a little upsetting but if you if you if you get the best ending which is to find all the parts of the dolphin including the secret bank vault where his money is and then leave before the 30 days is up then you fly away but you leave behind pickman that you've taught to kill like you've you've fed your you've fed their bloodlust and awakened it and they just like go out on their own and beat the shit out of uh bulbs or whatever they're just like like out there in a murder rampage and then the onions like fly away leave the planet so it's you know have you have you started some sort of interplanetary pariah like is the galaxy going

to become consumed and transformed into pickman it's like the lesson of a a bug's life but like taken to the fullest extent wow uh i think it's i think that bad ending is sweet in a way like Obviously, you know, all of ours dead, that's sad. But the Pickman are like... What do we do with dead things? Yeah, it's like, we know what to do with this guy. And hey, now you're one of us. Hey, we can just be Pickman forever here.

Welcome back, Dad. There really should have been a skin for him in Smash Bros. I don't think they didn't fight it or something, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. No one had anything more to get to get, to get,

but but we're but we're to say uh, no one had anything more to go.

Um, we're actually actually kind of running low on time. We're at an hour 20 already. So I don't think we are going to be able to make it to the sequels this time. But that's okay. When and if Pickman 4 ever comes out, all of these games will be retro. Maybe even, hey, hey, you, Pickman, whatever it's called.

Well, there was one thing I wanted to mention with the first game, though, which was the hit song in Japan that was related to it. the uh so for the commercials for pickman in japan when it first released there was a song by the group strawberry flower called aina uta meaning song of love which is just this really sweet little song like kind of folksy that is the lyrically about the life of a pickman about this you know unending devotion to somebody and like that we're going to keep trying together and And when we get consumed, we'll just come back and we'll work with you again. And it's just such a beautiful song.

I just really love it. Like when the game came out in the U.S., I'd already been hearing about the song online of like, oh, this is a hit song. You know, the GameCube's not selling great in Japan, but boy, the song, sell my gangbusters. And yeah, just pulling it up again, I just really love it. Like, look up the lyrics, and you can see how it really was written about

you know being a pickman and it's this but it's this song of like devotion to a person through like life and death and the cycle of death and rebirth and uh and the song you know then in pickman two it never appears in the game pickman but in pickman two if you get 20 of every type together in your hundred set you know they will sing this song like they will they will sing I know. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's all. And also the song is in, it's definitely in brawl, I believe. And, and so, yeah, I think they made like a sequel song to it for Pickman 2 that's not as good. But yeah, the, and there's the music video that's like the most viewed version of it on YouTube is a really nice little AMV for it. But yeah, I, I note is a really sweet song. I, you know, and America, we didn't get around all that much, but it's, it's, I always, when I think a Pickman and the cycle of life they go through in this game, I think of this song. That's really cute.

For, for me, uh, I think my, my favorite thing in, in all of the Pickman series is the, uh, the ads that they made for Pickman 2, just like the magazine ads and as well, the cover of the game, I believe, where they used claymation or they made little tiny models. They're so gorgeous and cute little designs that they put together. I hope someday, if there's a Pikmin 4 or maybe a Pikmin 5, who knows, that they go back to that style in the same way that Nintendo has done like Yoshi's Woolly World and, you know, kind of taken the textures of real objects and built a game aesthetic around them. I think Pickman would look so cool if they use that aesthetic in the actual game. Yeah, I really love the Japanese packaging and marketing.

for Pickman because it really focuses on just the characters. It's always very simple with like, you know, solid colors that are, they're not primaries but they're kind of like slightly off primary. Whereas, you know, the American covers, it's just like here's a render of Pickman being

eaten by a bulbar. It tries to make it exciting and violent, whereas in Japan it's just like, here's these cute little flower people, look at them standing here, staring plaintively at you. Don't you want to lead them? and to me that's way more effective

it's intriguing it's like who are these little like they're kind of like alien looking but but they also have like a flower on their head what's what's up with this and their little puppy dog guys begging you for help yeah I mean it's not surprising in America they're like

it's a fight to the death like it's just action yeah now pigment have angry eyes also when we talk about the heartbreak of these Pikman games I forgot to mention that like the the way they show you of like, hey, you left some Pickman behind and you're going to watch them get eaten right now.

Yeah. Every day at sunset. Yeah. The bulb warbs come out for a snack and you feel sad and get to you. Because they're just running around like, hey, where did everybody go? And you can't, you can't skip that cutscene. No. In two, they both give you more ways to be depressed and also give you ways to skip that depression.

So you can skip that, them getting eaten cut. seen, the death count is on a different screen, but if you flip over to it, it will tell you an itemized list of all the different ways your Pickman could have and maybe did die that day. And so, yeah, they let you get as into that or avoid it as much as you want, really. I have strong memories from that first game of, you know, kind of overreaching with my multitasking and just running as fast as I could as the last 10 seconds count. down to get back to my group of Pickman just to whistle for them so that they were, you know, in my party and then they would survive and, you know, being feet away when the time ran out,

which just meant, you know, dozens of them were, we're just going to be left left to die on the planet's surface at night. Really, really gutting. Yeah. It's a game full of hard lessons. I think, I think there's something to be said about the Nintendo's two, well, I mean, smash brothers too but nintendo's two like big launch games on the game cube were both pretty short but felt like run-based games where you could you get to the end of luigi's mansion and be like i could do i could do better than i could do better than that i could i could make you could make your numbers go up you could find more money or more treasure or whatever get a better grade whereas in pickman it's kind of like a less than 10-hour game if you look at it like that and

you can make all your numbers go down. You could do it in less number of days or lose less Pickman or, you know, some metric, you know, in that way. So, but yeah, they, they were both pretty short. I don't know if that was because of the memory on the little disc or just they needed a game out. And, but they both feel like they're complete games. Just short. I think sometimes a game just doesn't need to be 50 hours long. Sometimes seven or eight hours is just the right length for a game.

That's not what market research says, Jeremy. Oh, well, you know, market research says so, you know, we also need an Atari links that's like 70% empty air because it has to be huge. And if your box doesn't say multiplayer on the back around this time, then you're in trouble. Yep, yep. Now, I do hope it's not the end for Pickman, I think especially once they could get into HD era, it's like, wow, the,

level of detail like exponentially increase with that like it's pickman three is beautiful it's and the fruit juice like every time i play that game i'm just like i need to drink fruit juice now and it's so good it's like it has the same effect on me that ratatooie does with cheese i'm just like i need some of this in my body thank you but but i've heard the pickmen are alive and well even and in the real world because at the super nintendo world theme park you know how in d Disneyland there's hidden mickeys around and stuff. Apparently in the one in Osaka if it's, there's

hidden Pickman around in the world of Super. Not hidden Luigi's? Is that, has that ship sailed? Oh, Luigi's right in your face. Like he's, I don't, well, though there are other secrets there too. I don't want to spoil secrets for people. Yes, please don't. Before they go there, but there's lots, but you will find. God knows what we'll be able to

Japan, but whatever. Yeah. I think Pickman would be amazingly, it would be ripe for a full Pickman Land at Nintendo World where they scale everything up 50X, that would be really fun. I like it. But, you know, Nintendo has said Pickman 4 is nearly done

in 2015. Yeah, that was like six years ago. So you know, that's just a lot of polish they're doing, I'm sure. As long as our zest isn't making it, I'm fine with that. They're not allowed to make anything ever. all right. All right. I think that's going to wrap it up. So thank you, gentlemen, for talking about Pickman with me. We did not make it to pickman too. But, but

but this should not come as a surprise. That's how it always happens. I'm so glad I put together all those notes. The day ended too early. Yeah, exactly, right? We had to make it back to the ship or all my guests get eaten. So guests, let me give the usual spiel

and then I'll let you give your own spiels. This has been a Retronauts podcast, which you can find at Retronauts.com on various podcatchers, and of course at patreon.com slash retronauts where you can support the show. We are pretty much entirely community supported through subscriptions via Patreon. It allows us to make shows. It allows us to get together and talk in person and have a nice casual conversation

as opposed to a strained conversation that's Internet only. It allows us to hire cool people to help out to create artwork and edit podcasts for us and co-host the show and so on and so forth. So that's a good reason to support the show. It makes the show happen. You can find that at patreon.com slash retronauts for $3 a month. You get access to each show a week early and a higher bit rate than on the public feed

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Wes, what about you? Where can me find you find me on Twitter at at Wesley Fenland, and you can find me in the pages of PC Gamer magazine. There's also a website. Brian, how about you? Yeah, I'm on Twitch and Twitter at Luigi's Apartment. And my, I've got a new show I've been working on with Brad Ward from the Greenlit, Greenlit Podcast Network's Bradward.

We just put together a show called Need for Speed Running with Spike Vegeta and Jay Hobbs from Games Done Quick, where we pick a speed run, talk about it, kind of introduce the mechanics, and then watch it and break it down further and just kind of hang out. It's been a lot of fun. So we've got a Ratchet and Clank three run that's going to be up later this month in a couple weeks. So actually in a week, I should get on that. And also my other show that I've been doing for years is Chat of the Wild, which is a Legend of Zelda book club game club podcast where we've been going through the series in chronological order, usually one dungeon per episode, kind of breaking down how the games fit. together and work and stuff so we've done most of the series at this point in fact right now

our patrons unlocked a review of the cartoon show which is currently our side project and it's that's that's really right i don't know who that that show wasn't made for anyone it's uh it's kind of tragic i think the only person that show is for is bob forward who had a lifelong uh fantasy of being Robin Hood with a gun. So he made that cartoon. But yeah, follow me on, yeah, Luigi's apartment. All right. And Henry, that guy over there.

Hey, yes. If you enjoy hearing me on this podcast, I host several podcasts, released all the time. So me and Bob Mackie, the other co-host on Retronauts, we do the Talking Simpsons podcast where you go chronologically through the entirety of the Simpsons. Right now, we're nearing the end of season 12 and the end of season 2 at the same time. And it's a fun back and forth between 1991 and 2001.

Also, we do the What, a cartoon podcast, where we cover an animated series twice a month, super in-depth going into its history. Jeremy has been on several of them. We did a bubblegum crisis one. We did G.I. Joe, the Max. Those are just the Jeremy episodes. And we so many other great ones. and on patreon.com slash talking Simpsons, that's where we're supported, where we offer a ton of extras, including we're doing our 10 favorite episodes of Batman, the animated series.

We are having a whole lot of fun talking about, old Batman, we love it, and we do the What a Cartoon movie podcast for extra premium patrons. Hear us talk about the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer Rankin' Bass special just in time for the holidays. That's all, Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, and please follow us. me on Twitter at H-E-R-E-R-E-Y-G. I am certainly tweeting about Nintendo-related products I probably, as you're listening to this, I would guess

SMT-5 were Advanced Wars. I'm probably playing quite a lot of that. Yeah, that would seem likely. I can't wait. Jeremy, we'll do, you're going to commit to a Retronauts about Advanced Wars the remake right now, right? That's a patron request if you're subscribing at that level.

Okay, so anyway, you can finally find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. You can check out my YouTube channel. It's called Jeremy Parrish. And I cover a lot of Nintendo and Sega stuff every week. A different video about the chronology of those companies' game systems. And of course, I'm doing stuff at limited rungames.com, including publishing books and writing stuff for games and so forth. Yeah, we're all busy people. So we still felt the need to take the time to come together and talk about Pickman because it's great. We love it. And now

the sun has set and we've got to get back to our onion. Sounds delicious. Thank you.