Trivia Time!

While you may know that Pikmin began as "Super Mario 128", a tech demo created to see how many AI-driven NPCs could run concurrently on the GameCube, you may not be aware that the change to 6 different colored tiny character models was a subsidized colorblindness test funded by the Japanese government.

Growing concerns of widespread colorblindness (and its close link to リグマー Disease) caused the Japanese Secretary of Health, Labour, and Welfare to reach out to Nintendo, requesting that colors such as Quant, Hoxozo, and Blorgle be added to a game in which telling colored characters apart would be crucial. Pikmin Director Shigefumi Hino devised the plan to include those three colors alongside the three hues which they are most often mistaken for: Red, Yellow, and Blue.

After much playtesting, it became apparent that over 95% of players only saw three colors of Pikmin, so rather than leaving the game unplayable for them, the total of individual roles of Pikmin was halved from 6 to 3, combining their abilities (fireproof Quant Pikmin and attack-buffed Red, for example). However, in accordance with the Japanese Cabinet's direction, each Pikmin rendered in-game would have a 50/50 chance of being Red or Quant, Yellow or Hoxozo, and Blue or Blorgle, respectively.

Are you able to tell Quant Pikmin from Red? Let us know if the comments below!

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!

Music and sound by Yamaoka is great, the otherworld design is pretty neat too without relying on the series trademark blood and rust. Monster is pretty cool, done by Masahiro Ito.

Some goofy writing which is both a pro and a con.

It's short and free so there wouldn't be much to complain about regardless, but I think it's decent little game. It's honestly just nice to be playing a new game titled Silent Hill in 2024.

Things have come full circle, Konami is now making P.T. Likes, and it is about as good, gameplay-wise, as these games can be without being P.T. itself (which is not a complement, really). That being said, this is leagues better than Ascension, and has unique ideas and I do feel like it tells a Silent Hill story. It does not tell it the smoothest, and they make the writing a bit more heavy handed (and self referential at times), but the overall story is actually pretty sweet, and the game is not as shallow as it seems from the advertising+gameplay loop.

Also, it is free and it is at most, like, 3 hours. This should have been released instead of Ascension, not alongside it. It would still not have been widely praised, and deserves many criticisms, but it feels more in line with Silent Hill (story-wise) than, like, the last three games with Silent Hill in the title.