I picked up Pikmin (Gamecube) when my first child was an infant, so my parenting skills were always intertwined with those little idiots.

I was in my 20s, long before having children, and I was yelling at them like toddlers, too.

My friend at the time was plying and accidentally called a whole pack of blue Pikmin through a wall of fire, killing all of them, and he just paused the game and said, “I’m a bad father.”

Pikmin is a crash course in what it’s like to have dependents.

Stupid double post errors...

Pikmin is such a great game because I can't think of many other games where you send soldiers to their death whom you're so emotionally attached to. Obviously there are tons of RTS where you control an army but I'm not as invested in their survival.

It probably has something to do with the player character physically being on the ground with the pikmin, throwing them to their demise. In most RTSes you're a faceless overlord commanding the troops from up on high.

That makes perfect sense!

I honestly thought it was a bad spelling of pokemon

Please avoid XCOM

For the swarm

Way ahead of you, buddy 😎

I'm still not convinced it isn't.

Ah, XCOM, two squares away, using an RPG, 96% chance to hit the alien, shoot, miss, take out the team mate with only an eye poking out from behind a wall because he was caught in the explosion when the rocket hit the corner. Use the rest of your movement to take a step back to reduce your odds of death, alien walks up and guts you.

Typical combat sequence. Loved that game.

There's always a Rimworld.

They have to juice the probabilities in later games because people don't understand percentage chance. People were complaining when they missed within 96% chance of hitting, not realising that occasionally missing is expected. People thought that 96% was basically the same as 100%, which is a rather large indictment on the education system.

Yeah, that was part of it, but there were many combat sequences that I experienced where statistically unlikely things happened a statistically unlikely number of times per combat. I won't rule out bugs, but I also won't rule out perception bias.

I had a similar feeling when playing Fallout, which made Thadeus's combat scenes very relatable when watching Fallout.