I believe in Pikmin. I am certain that human life will end through nuclear war or ecological negligence, and someday a funny little man will land here on a spaceship and pluck doting vegetable guys out the ground to fight mutant spiders and frogs. I think the setting raises interesting and prescient ideas about the nature of survival and social hierarchies. It's the central reason I have such a problem with Pikmin 1 receiving a staight-to-VHS comedy sequel.

Having survived the first game by the skin of his teeth, Olimar arrives home and is immediately sent back to Pikminland because his boss is skint. I hate this miserable coda. I hate that his longing to see his family again is put on hold to chase money. I hate that earth is immediately seen as a place to mine for resources. I think there's a kind of dark satire about capitalistic greed in it, but I do not enjoy this part of the fantasy. I feel sick.

Pikmin 2 isn't a game about survival anymore. There's no time limit, except the daily clock, which seems more of an irritation here than the structural grounding it served as in the original game. The game's more willing to kill off your Pikmin now, because you can just go farm more. Olimar and Louie can stay here as long as they want, and seemingly, the only reason to rush is to complete the game with a score you can boast about. There's still the familiar Pikmin gameplay, but that's largely relegated to the overworld sections. The bulk of Pikmin 2's content is found in the caves; RANDOMLY GENERATED dungeons with a series of floors to excavate treasures from. Pikmin 2's quite antithetical to 1's carefulness. The Pikmin are fodder now. If they die, tough luck. Fuck your wasted time. Go find some more and try again. They probably don't have souls, right?

I've got as much distaste for randomly generated content and roguelikes as anyone, and it's a big sticking point with the game for me. It's tempting to lay it on too thick. In reality, Pikmin 2 is generating content from a fairly well-crafted library of pieces. There's still humanity in the product. Some cave floors are clever and creative. One uses a toy train track to create a central barrier that Pikmin can walk on top of without falling off, but they can walk under the drawbridge. It's cute and smart, even if it does undercut the game's setting pretty dramatically. Random elements generally come in the form of enemy and item placement, and it never creates anything unplayable, even if there are a few too many dead ends and groups of explosive nightmares.

This review follows the new Switch release of the game. It's an awkward thing. I became a Pikmin fan through the original Wii U release of 3, and the New Play Control versions of 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. To me, pointer controls are just how Pikmin is supposed to play. I'm aware there's GameCube folk who think being able to aim all over the screen messes with the intended balance, but it's just a much more deliberate aiming system than wobbling a cursor based on where your character's facing. I think 4's implementation of a lock-on system was a decent compromise, but Nintendo's already come up with the solution to this problem. Going back to the classic controls feels like playing an FPS on the Dreamcast. There is motion control support in here, but it's the airyfairy implementation from 4, where you can manipulate your cursor within the character's throwing range, and it doesn't feel any easier or more intuitive than just accepting the rudimentary 2001 standard.

In an act of curious apathy, Nintendo have chosen to base the widescreen implementation on the Wii version's clumsy presentation. While gameplay and cutscenes are presented in a native 16:9 aspect ratio, menus and text are consistently stretched to fit the dimensions of modern TVs. As the traumatised Captain Olimar is sent back to PNF-404, I'm being dragged back into the horror of friends' 2004 living rooms to suffer wrong-looking Simpsons.

I'll admit I've had a better time with Pikmin 2 on Switch than I did on my initial Wii playthrough. Knowing this is the one I didn't have much emotional attachment to helped warm me to the idea of the Pikmin gameplay grab-bag. It's a shallow pleasure, and I'd be callous enough to suggest its biggest fans have shallow appreciation for the games' setting. That said, previous releases of the game featured licensed products as its "treasures", and I've always felt a bit of a thrill from their subversive implication. The human race is dead, and the only remaining evidence of their civilisation is capitalistic waste. The Duracell batteries and Haribo bags are, understandably, not in this new version, I'll always have a bit of respect for Pikmin 2 for how it egged corporations into painting themselves as the problem.

Some people think Pikmin 2 is the best in the series. Who am I to say otherwise? Maybe you'll love it. I just hope I helped you understand why I really don't.

I've seen a few reviews on here that claim Katamari Damacy has terrible controls. In Katamari you need both analog sticks to move; move both sticks up to roll forward, down for backwards, hold the left stick up and the right stick down to quickly move the Prince to the left, and vice versa. Rapidly move the analog sticks up and down for a few seconds to perform a dash and you can press both sticks in to do a 180-degree turn. I personally think these controls are perfect; sure, it may take a while to get used to them, but just because they're weird or different doesn't mean they're bad. I kind of see it like tank controls, except I see more people bitch about that. Katamari NEEDS two analog sticks to work! So, what do you get when you put Katamari on a console with only one analog nub? You get one scuffed Katamari game, probably the worst in the series! Everything the right analog stick used to do is now on the four face buttons. Triangle replaces holding up on the right stick and x replaces holding down. For the dash you need to press the nub up and the triangle button alternatively, and for the quick turn press left on the nub and the circle button twice in quick succession. Just like with other Katamari games, you can get used to them eventually (remapping the face buttons to the right analog stick helps) but there are issues beyond the controls here.

This is the third game in the series and is the first game made without the involvement of series creator Keita Takahashi and it shows. Each level plays out the exact same way. Roll up to this amount, then get transported to a new map, timer resets and roll around again. Now repeat this for about 4 and a half hours. This may sound like a normal Katamari game, but the problem is that every level is the god damn same thing every single time. Rollable objects are always in the same position; the size number you need to achieve is the same, and the order the maps appear in is the same; they could have at least randomized them! I didn't count how many maps are in the game, but there's really not too many. Your objective is always the same, just roll and get bigger; it gets mind-numbing real quick. We Love Katamari introduced a lot of stage variety like rolling a sumo wrestler around so he can eat and get bigger for an upcoming sumo match. A boy got caught up with studying and didn't pay his electricity bill; now go roll up fireflies so he can continue his studies. There's a stage where you enter a race and now your Katamari will automatically accelerate. This game offers nothing of that caliber. There's a few levels off to the side that amount to rolling up as much as you can for a few minutes with no real way to fail.

I saw a comment somewhere that the described this game as soulless and that's completely accurate. I can't even complement the music as most of the soundtrack is ripped from the first two games.