Weekly Game Music: The Impact Site (Pikmin)


There’s a relatively lesser known Nintendo game called Pikmin. Everything about it should have been a blockbuster: Mario series creator and video game legend Shigeru Miyamoto designed the game. Nintendo themselves show-cased the game as a demonstration of their new console, Gamecube’s abilities to handle numerous characters and their AI. Some people argued this was the first game to get Real-Time Strategy right on a console. And yet…it fell through everyone’s radar. A shame, since the music in the game — such as The Impact Site, composed by Hajime Wakai — is wonderfully organic to match the wild-life nature of this game.

Pikmin has a relatively simple plot. Captain Olimar, a space captain cruising through space on a vacation, collides into an asteroid, and gets marooned on to an unknown planet. Unfortunately for Olimar, this planet is treacherous. Every creature, including spiders, are large and vicious. Worse, the planet’s atmosphere is toxic to Olimar, and he must rely on the month-long air supply left on his ship. His only path of escaping this planet — retrieving every lost spaceship piece, and repairing his ship — seems like an impossible task. Yet, as Olimar hopelessly scavenges his immediate surrounding, he encounters a loyal plant-based humanoid creatures that he names, “Pikmin.” He finds breeding these species to create an army is rather easy, and uses them as forces to defeat enemies and gather his lost spaceship parts.

Pikmin plays a lot like a Real-Time Strategy game. As Captain Olimar, you direct an army of Pikmins to handle different tasks, such as building bridges, fighting enemies, and carrying spaceship pieces. Olimar uses his whistle to gather Pikmins within a certain radius, and throws them to handle the selected tasks. Pikmins is breed by carrying dead enemies into their home-base, Onions. As there’s only a month of air supply available, your time in gathering all the spaceship pieces are limited.

Pikmin was released on the Gamecube, and later, ported to the Wii. It’s dramatically improved sequel was only released on the Gamecube for the US.


Extra!

Title: The Forest Navel
Game: Pikmin
Composer: Hajime Wakai

Title: 2P Battle
Game: Pikmin 2
Composer: Hajime Wakai


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