Looking back at it now, a good number of years after the death of the console, Nintendo’s GameCube first party output was a big ol’ mixed bag. On one hand we had the classy Metroid Prime and the subsequent sequel, whilst on the other we had the disappointment that was Mario Sunshine and the ‘it’s-not-as-good-as-the-N64-Zeldas’ Wind Waker, which had a lovely visual style but managed to bore the heck out of me with insanely dull sailing sections. Luckily for me, Nintendo did come up with something else that justified my purchase of my little purple cube.

That game was Pikmin, a game that supposedly incorporated most of the ideas that were being chucked about for Mario 128. Fresh from the rather funhouse mirror imagination of Shigeru Miyamoto, the general idea was that you controlled Captain Olimar, a space captain stranded on an unfamiliar planet after a collision with an asteroid and with only enough oxygen for 30 days left in his tank. Luckily for him, the planet is inhabited by a selection of strange carrot-like animals named Pikmin that he can exploit in order to get his little ship rebuilt and fly home, so all is not lost for the little guy.

A bizarre premise, sure, but under the hood Pikmin was cleverer than a university educated fox. Mixing a bit of action with a bit of real-time strategy, you were tasked with pelting around a number of expansive levels as Olimar, using Pikmin to grow more of themselves from their little coloured onion spaceships, defeat enemies, build bridges and rescue ship parts. Having the little guys trooping around after you and moving them around with the C button was one of gaming’s happier, more smiley moments, and the little fanfare as you had them run around in circles trying to attack or build things was unmistakably Nintendo.

Initial levels saw the game giving you relatively little to get to grasps with, handing you but one of the three Pikmin colours on offer and making sure that you were well versed in gathering Pikmin coins by whacking flowers and recovering them, fighting enemies and building/destroying various structures. In terms of getting used to the basics it did a superb job and introduced players to the various ins and outs with a nice, steady learning curve, allowing them to salvage the first parts of their ship in a more relaxed manner.

Obvious things did eventually pick up, and it was at this point that the game started chucking different Pikmin colours around for the player to use. The standard red effort may have been the strong, fire-resistant type, but in water he was utterly useless and hence the blue type was more helpful in aquatic scenarios. In the midst of this was the yellow type that you could chuck further and that could carry wall-destroying bombs. The use of each could solve particular problems that the levels threw up, and mastering which Pikmin needed to be used in certain situations was crucial to progress.

It simply slotted together beautifully, with each of the five settings unravelling as you undertook each of the game’s thirty days. Each day lasted approximately 15 minutes, giving the player a pretty short time to organise his troops and head off in a direction to explore. The general process by which the game played out was that the player would go to an area, find a part of the ship and take note of what obstacles stood in his way, arrange the necessary Pikmin troops and return to bash, smash and construct their way to the part. This in turn opened up new areas to explore and scout out for future days, with each section offering some kind of shortcut, item or obstacle that could be used to gain further Pikmin troops and gather more ship parts.

It sounds great fun, and it really was. It definitely wasn’t without its troubles, though, and there were a couple of niggling little issues that prevented the game being a triple A title. The first was that the days themselves didn’t really last long enough, meaning that the player didn’t get much time to explore his surroundings free from the pressure of the ticking clock. Given the weird and wonderful setting this was genuinely a shame, and the way that time continually ticked meant that the player often had to reload a day because he made a seemingly minor mistake and damaged his progress.

The control over the Pikmin was a bit woolly too, and although you could direct them around separately to Olimar with the C stick it was all too easy to lose whole groups of the things behind jutting objects and obstacles. The worst part of it all was trying to manoeuvre a group of multicoloured Pikmin over a bridge spanning a bit of water, as inevitably a bunch of the goons would slip off over the side or simply walk the wrong direction and end up in the drink, which for the non blue variety was rather fatal.

These annoyances did hamper the experience slightly, but it is to Pikmin’s immense credit that you could stomach them all and still finish the 30 game days with a smile on your face, no matter what ending you got. Cheerful, chunky and colourful visuals certainly helped the cause, as did a hum-along soundtrack, but underneath all the cheeriness was a carefully balanced, brilliantly thought-out piece of strategy gaming. A sequel popped up a couple of years later and pretty much improved on the original in most areas, but as a title that promised to spawn a whole new series of games from arguably the world’s finest games developer, the first was something to behold. Quite where Pikmin goes from its current state of inactivity is anybody’s guess, but a Wii sequel would be something to take very seriously indeed.