Ah, GameCube. As wonderful it and its games were, you can't deny it was one of Nintendo's "darker day" consoles. That in itself is a great shame due to the many wonderful games the console was home to: even those who are reading now might have picked up a Wii as their first Nintendo home console and might never have played such amazing titles as Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or, say… Pikmin?

If you've ever visited the home of Shigeru Miyamoto (unlikely), you'll have seen the inspiration for Pikmin sitting in his back garden; rather, you'll have seen that the inspiration for Pikmin was his back garden. The Pikmin series is Miyamoto's latest brainchild and, first seen in Japan in 2001, it's also Nintendo's newest core franchise, as well as the first option for re-release as part of the New Play Control! series of games. As such, its target market has been opened up to casual gamers and new core gamers, giving it a far greater popularity.

So, we have the newcomers to Pikmin as well as its veteran players. We'd best split this up into two parts, then.