Pikmin 3

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto has given an update to Eurogamer on his long-awaited next Pikmin project.

Pikmin's portable side-scrolling spin-off, Hey! Pikmin, now has a release date of 28th July on 3DS.

Nintendo announced the release date at the top of its Nintendo Direct stream tonight.

Like other Pikmin titles, this handheld outing puts players in the space boots of stranded astronaut Captain Olimar as he befriends sentient vegetables and manipulates them into doing his bidding. It's not as cruel as it sounds, given that these things don't exactly excel at self-preservation, but now they have a purpose: to get you off this rock!

Read more

Exactly a year ago, Nintendo confirmed to Eurogamer that it was working on Pikmin 4.

Pikmin 4 is in development and "very close to completion", Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has exclusively confirmed to Eurogamer.

Shigeru Miyamoto will be debuting Pikmin Short Movies, an anthology of three Pikmin short films he produced, at this year's The Tokyo International Film Festival running from 25th-31st October.

Pikmin 3 has been updated to allow for Stylus-based controls.

Pikmin 3 is getting paid DLC, with the first pack hitting the Wii U's eShop today. An update introduces a new and free map, with a 'Collect Treasure' stage pack that bolts three levels on to the game's Mission Mode available for £1.79.

New packs will be available in the future, with details to be announced by Nintendo.

It's not the first time Nintendo has produced DLC for its flagship titles - New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the 3DS introduced level packs, and this year a substantial Luigi-flavoured add-on was released for New Super Mario Bros. U.

Read more

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed the secret behind Pikmin 3's hidden memos.

If you've ever played a Pikmin game, you'll probably be aware of that sharp pang of guilt you get when night falls and you realise you haven't managed to get all of your colourful little helpers back to the onion safely. Now you can take a little solace, at least: it turns out that Shigeru Miyamoto, the series' creator, knows exactly how you feel.

UPDATE: Asda has said it will still continue to support Nintendo despite withdrawing Wii U consoles and games from all of its shop shelves.

The boxed version of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has beaten Nintendo's new release Pikmin 3 to win first place in the UK all-formats chart.

After years of false starts and shattered hopes, Pikmin 3's now only hours away from release. It's all kind of exciting - I've got one eye hungrily on the letterbox, waiting for my copy to drop, and I don't think I'm alone.

UK retailer GAME is sending out digital download codes for Wii U masterpiece Pikmin 3 two days before its intended release date.

Legend has it that the Pikmin series began life as its creator's response to starting a garden. In truth, though, it feels more like his response to starting a family. This is a game built of empathy and responsibility - a game about exploring a familiar world from an unfamiliar, childlike vantage point, and about trying to ensure that the equally childlike characters who assist you on the journey come to no harm along the way.

Pikmin's concerned with being a kid, then, but it's also concerned with being a parent. The colours are bright and the music's chirpy, yet when the hour grows late and your precious charges are far from home, the whole thing reveals itself as a dark fantasy of stress; of fretful absences and setting suns and of a seemingly breezy world that, upon closer inspection, is teeming with brisk malice.

A child's perspective and a parent's anxiety: previous Pikmin games have played with this tension, and you could argue over whether either quite mastered its balance. The first Pikmin had a strict time limit that gave Captain Olimar just 30 days to reclaim the scattered parts of his crashed spaceship with the assistance of those helpful vegetable people and their selection of special skills. The ensuing adventure was a game that you could play for seven hours straight and then lose.

Read more

Nintendo's top designer Shigeru Miyamoto has explained that its developers struggled with the hardware leap from Wii to Wii U, and that's why some of the console's initial software line-up has been a long time coming.

The Wii U launched with New Super Mario Bros. U and mini-game collection Nintendo Land, but other 'launch window' titles such as Pikmin 3, Game & Wario and The Wonderful 101 have yet to arrive. It's especially surprising as The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was Nintendo's only blockbuster Wii release in the last two years of that console's life.

"Any time you have a big jump in the hardware technology it certainly takes the teams time to learn that and adjust their development environment in order to adapt to those big changes," Miaymoto told GamesIndustry International.

Read more

Nintendo's retreat from the very public PR war of the E3 press conferences turned out to be a more literal one than we might have thought. This morning in Los Angeles, the company replaced its traditional stage show first with its Nintendo Direct live stream and then by inviting press to its stand before the show floor opened to play six key Wii U titles and meet their creators.

Nintendo has revealed release dates for a number of upcoming Wii U games, including Pikmin 3 and Platinum's The Wonderful 101.

Pikmin 3 will finally arrive in Europe on 26th July. The three new player characters were named as Alph, Charlie, Brittany, who must scour the Pikmin world for food to survive.

Platinum's The Wonderful 101 will arrive on 23rd August, meanwhile.

Read more

Large-scale press conferences broadcast live on the internet mark the bombastic beginning of each E3 show. Every year Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony executives appear on-stage at some gargantuan Los Angeles venue to announce new games and, sometimes, new consoles.

1994 SNES classic Earthbound will be released for the first time in Europe this year via the Wii U Virtual Console.

The Virtual Console will soon launch in full after a successful trial run of releases. It's due to be added to the Wii U eShop after the console's firmware update next week - the one that will significantly reduce system load times.

In a just-finished Nintendo Direct broadcast, the company showed fresh Pikmin 3 gameplay featuring the new breed of pink Winged Pikmin briefly visible in last year's E3 demo.

Read more

This week Nintendo will release its crucial third-quarter sales results and reveal how Wii U fared during its initial two months on sale. The company had promised to ship 5.5 million Wii U consoles by the end of March and end the financial year back in the black, thus avoiding a repeat of last year's damaging loss - the first in the company's history.

The loss was described as a blip that occurred as Nintendo price-dropped the 3DS and wrapped up costly research and design on the Wii U. It was a cost the company would not repeat, Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata told investors. But profits for this year have already been revised down. In October, Nintendo forecasted a new, slimmer earnings margin for the year, with the Wii U's early success playing a critical part. It's this early performance that we can now try to evaluate, with the console launched and already past its first holiday sales season.

Nintendo UK has remained silent about Wii U sales, but MCV reported first-weekend results of 40,000 consoles. It's a modest sum compared to other launches constrained by the level of stock allocated to the UK, although what did filter through to shop shelves didn't entirely sell out.

Read more

Pikmin creator Shigeru "I created Mario and Zelda" Miyamoto has stated that he'd like to make Pikmin 3 more stressful than its relatively carefree sequel, and more akin to that of the first game in the strategy series.

Nintendo's much-anticipated garden adventure Pikmin 3 will now launch for Wii U in "Q2 2013", Nintendo has announced.

Nintendo has shown off upcoming Google Maps functionality for the Wii U, which allows users to control the panoramic StreetView mode by panning the GamePad.

Put a jet engine in them if you like - Nintendo doesn't care how powerful Microsoft's and Sony's new consoles are.

It was, in case you missed it, an E3 filled with grisly violence and torture porn. Here's Lara Croft falling on sticks and fighting off rapists! There's Agent whatnot pummelling some nuns! How did Nintendo decide to kick off its conference, then? Kirby yanking a rusty nail out of his foot? Muddy Mole - Google him - punching an old lady out of a skyscraper and onto the spinning blades of a passing chopper? Nope. Nintendo set things rolling with what still feels like its most disturbing franchise ever - Pikmin.

I mean: Pikmin. Pikmin's not so sweet, is it? It's all about landing on some quiet, pleasant sort of planet, enslaving most of the population, and then treating them as mere resources in order to get what you want. Does anyone else out there find Captain Olimar a little hard to love with all his slave driving and mass hypnotism? It's all, "go here, carry this, fight that thing to the death." Then he's off on his spaceship with a nod and wink. I fear for the dark day that he discovers planet Earth.

Nintendo gets away with it, though, because it dresses this miserable parable of colonialism up in such bright colours and bucolic textures. Also, because I'm reading too much into it and it's all just good family-friendly fun in the first place. Deep breath.

Read more

Hands on with a new breed of Miyamoto's garden strategy.

Pikmin 3 on Wii U will have local multiplayer but not online multiplayer, creator Shigeru Miyamoto has confirmed.

Frame-rate tests on the E3 build of Wii U's impressive new game from Mr Miyamoto.

Nintendo has revealed a list of all Wii U titles revealed so far.

Nearly five years in the waiting.

Nintendo has just revealed the long-awaited Pikmin 3 for Wii U.

UPDATE: The games listed are just speculative placeholders entered by the retailer's sales team, according to a GoNintendo source.

Nintendo will reveal Pikmin Wii U at E3 in June, it has announced.

Yesterday an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in Spanish newspaper El Mundo suggested an appearance at E3. Now Nintendo has confirmed it.

"In a recent interview, Mr. Miyamoto confirmed that a new Pikmin game will be shown at the E3 Expo in June," a Nintendo spokesperson said. "He believes that anyone who has played Pikmin games in the past will enjoy playing."

Read more

Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto has shifted his main focus from overseeing established series like Mario and Zelda to creating fresh game ideas.

Nintendo has pledged to learn from the mistakes of the 3DS launch when releasing Wii U.

Update: Zavvi has informed Eurogamer that the Pikmin 3DS listing on its website was a mistake.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said he's "not conscious" of any rivals to Nintendo; not Apple, not cloud computing, not Microsoft or Sony.

Shigeru Miyamoto has reportedly offered an update on development of a third game in cutesy strategy series Pikmin.

Good news for fans of GameCube classic Pikmin - a sequel is on the way, according to none other than Shigeru Miyamoto.