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On the surface, Pikmin is one of Nintendo's most adorable creations. A tiny spaceman called Captain Olimar marshals an army of even tinier plant sprites which swarm and scurry around an environment that looks, to him, like an exotic alien planet, but to us like our back yard. Even its inspiration is bucolic: the idea came to Shigeru Miyamoto's whimsical imagination as he pottered in his own garden.This sounds relaxing, but the games are anything but. A wholly original spin on real-time strategy, Pikmin combines resource management and combat with exploration and puzzle-solving in a frantic exercise in multitasking, all against the clock. It's hard and stressful, and even its cuteness is turned against you. The reedy wails emitted by your Pikmin expiring in some ill thought-out ruckus with a Bulborb will prick your guilt and haunt your dreams.
So it's not surprising that Nintendo might want to put these winsome little creatures to work in something a little more easygoing. Enter Hey! Pikmin, a humble 3DS puzzle-platformer for all ages. It swaps a bird's-eye view of an open map for a close, side-scrolling camera, and hundreds of Pikmin for a handful. You don't grow them, only collect them, and they stay with Olimar rather than being dispatched to the four corners of the map - though you can use a stylus tap to fling them to the edges of the screen, or even up into the top screen, to battle or fetch.
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