Pikmin - Emperor Bulblax

[camwoodstock]

&: raocow, swarming way too many Red Pikmin onto a Spotty Bulbear:

what does olimar breathe, anyway? Helium?

&: I wrote a whole bunch on this, and in true "us" fashion, it got very long, very fast. I've put it in spoilers, but the tl;dr is "our hypothesis is probably a lot of nitrogren, and a good portion of xenon, with many trace elements similar to that of our own planet".

For one, the idea that breathing oxygen is poisonous sounds like a wacky fantasy thing, but nope! Oxygen is actually mildly toxic! It's only very mildly toxic, however--you'd have to breath like, pure oxygen and nothing else to feel the effects. Or drink way, way too much water, like even more than the physically improbable amount of quantity.

As for what Olimar could be breathing: I'm about to rock the inner 6th grader in you's word--there's MORE to air than just Oxygen. In fact, Oxygen only comprises roughly 20.9% of air! The main consistency of air is Nitrogen--roughly 78% of the air is Nitrogen, actually, meaning there's more of IT than there is oxygen! From there, you have Argon, which is only about 0.9% of air, then Carbon Dioxide at 0.03%, and after that, you end up with only trace amounts of miscellaneous elements like Neon, Methane, Helium, Krypton, Hydrogen, Xenon, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, Iodine, even lesser trace amounts of Carbon Monoxide, Ammonia, and lemme add in an etc. in case we missed any further trace elements.

As for what this means for his home planet of Hocotate: While we rarely see it, what we know from Pikmin 2's opening cinematic is that it has a blue sky. Odds are, it's got a LOT of Nitrogen (it is, after all, the most basic gas), but what the next most common element is is fairly ambiguous. It can't be Argon, because it's purple. Our best guess is xenon--usually a trace element in our atmosphere, but it's got a distinctive blue-ish color. Hocotatian biology is known to be different from Human biology as-is as they're incapable of filtering out oxygen in their bodies, so breathing large amounts of xenon and avoiding its usual anesthetic properties on humans is probably fair.

...Oh, and as for the Koppaiates in Pikmin 3, it seems they're able to breath oxygen, but they aren't immune to other side effects of oxygen--their planet likely has a lot more of it than Hocotate does, though, seeing as they can cultivate Earth fruit just fine.

lol olimar breaths farts

olimar, more like oliFART,

&: That would be methane.

[kitikami]

re:atmosphere

The color of Earth's sky isn't caused by the color of the gases in the atmosphere but by Rayleigh scattering, which has to do with the size of the particles in the atmosphere relative to the wavelength of light. Shorter wavelengths are more likely to be scattered, so we see more blue light scattered across the sky. Conversely, when light enters the atmosphere near the horizon, most blue light gets scattered before it reaches us, and the red/orange light that doesn't scatter as much stays near the horizon. Hence sunrises and sunsets.

Mars has a red-ish sky and blue sunsets because the atmosphere is much thinner and scattering is mostly from dust particles in the air, which are much larger than gas molecules and scatter longer wavelengths of light more efficiently (the reverse of Earth, basically). The thickness of the atmosphere and a planet's star color could also influence sky color beyond atmosphere composition.

Argon and Xenon are both normally colorless (like most of Earth's atmosphere), but have violet and blue emission spectra (i.e. the wavelength of light they emit when electrons jump between between states). Argon and Xenon lamps are violet and blue because they generate light by ionizing the gas inside and causing electrons to jump around, but you wouldn't see that effect from atoms or molecules just sitting in the atmosphere.

[Skye]

.

[camwoodstock]

&: Cannot say "blowing up the frogs" occurred to us as a tactic. raocow manages to continue to use bombs not wisely, but hilariously.

[Crow]

The most dangerous foe

frogaloo

[kitikami]

If Nintendo ever releases another Pikmin game, they need to hire raocow to record the intro.

[XionGaTaosenai]

"our hypothesis is probably a lot of nitrogren, and a good portion of xenon, with many trace elements similar to that of our own planet".

I think getting too caught up on the composition of Hocotate's atmosphere is answering the wrong question. As you mentioned, the air we breathe on Earth is mostly Nitrogen, but we refer to ourselves as "Oxygen breathers" because Oxygen is the gas we actually use to power our metabolisms. So the answer to "what does Olimar even breathe" would be the gas that Olimar actually uses to power his metabolism. Obviously, this would be a gas that would be relatively abundant in Hocotate's atmosphere, but it also has to be a gas that's chemically capable of such a function - so I feel like that automatically rules out any noble gas, like Helium, Argon, or Xenon (among others), because their whole deal is how non-reactive they are, so they can't really do anything chemically. I don't know enough about biochemistry to rule out Nitrogen on principle, but a cursory browsing though the subject on anaerobic respiration on Wikipedia turned up nothing of the sort.

[Shard1697]

(not for cow eyes)

for the sake of anyone not familiar with this game, I thought I'd make a little demo of the strats people have talked about in this thread/youtube comments

also that one big enemy that only shows up early in the spring

[camwoodstock]

&: You can Pik your friends, but you can't Pik your Min.

&: I CALLED IT!!! ^0^

[EllenHouraisan]

It's so interesting how the game gets quite a lot out of its simple combat mechanics. Having to toss a pikmin to plug the boss' breathing hole and open up its weakspot is neat, and I'm glad that for once the game makes raocow engage with the boss so we can see that. This game really captured me, I dunno. It's certainly one of those unique, fascinating little things.

I'm surprised I haven't heard of any indie spiritual sequels of it yet, come to think of it. Feels like the kind of game that would be prime for those.

[Crow]

I'm surprised I haven't heard of any indie spiritual sequels of it yet, come to think of it. Feels like the kind of game that would be prime for those.

hey you're in luck!

[EllenHouraisan]

Well then. Can't say I'm surprised!

[camwoodstock]

once again, this image we made in 2019 is relevant. Works Every Time*!


&: *Does not work if you are Vixi and Luna. We are not accepting complaints nor refunds.

[Shard1697]

tbh I never like using "yellow bomb sacrifice" strat, it's so fiddly swapping between yellows and reds in this game while keeping them safe and it doesn't even stun him that long

[Catabo]

What's your video game weak spot?

a. glowing red eyes
b. the jowls

REVENGE of blue pikmin Lv100 Eldritch Blue Pikmin.png (53.58 KiB) Viewed 2447 times

[Skye]

.

[SAJewers]

[camwoodstock]

a bit of words abt the bulblax: indeed, your expected strat is to basically feed it a bomb and stun it. behind the wall on the other side of the arena is a cache of bombs. we genuinely thought the fight was impossible without bombs, like the game would simply not let you win or smth? but in true fashion for this lp, raocow has managed to beat this fight correctly in the most incorrect manner possible, and the result is the first bomb-less fight we've ever seen of this guy... ever???

also raocow did NOT lose all yellows, the game would literally declare a Pikmin Extinction if he did (this is a real mechanic) and forcibly restart the day (this is a real mechanic) and on that next day the empty onion spurts out a single seed of that color (this is a real mechanic). they were indeed hiding

&: One thing we want someone to make is a graph showing the progression of Olimar's Pikmin Tallies across the days. Granted, that graph is gonna look *ugly* on the final day slide, oops... ;P

a bit of a posterity fact: obviously, a lot of these icons were sourced from the piklopedia in pikmin 2. a few were created by pikipedia site. however, in the case of various bosses, we had to manually resize their images (in the piklopedia, they're 80x80, unlike the 40x40 icons of standard enemies). however, there's one icon we made ourselves... and then we never got to use it. we had prepared an olimar icon to use should raocow have taken a third day for some reason! it was never needed bc this is the final day. we thought it looked good tho, sooo here it be! a Captive Olive Mart


also, the two characters we never got to use the icons for were the goolix (a remote miniboss in the impact site, NOT the forest navel like the video claims! the video has a Lot of inaccurate locations it turns out, as it comes from early development) and the smoky progg (bonus boss in the distant spring if you visit it pre-day 15. would have certainly been a massacre). aside from those two, raocow actually encountered everything!

whenever pikmin 2 comes around we are fucking Ready my guy. we're pre-emptively calling dibz on the thread actually (implying it's not a spyro situation and it inherits this thread and we just innately get it anyways! ;p)

and thus, raocow finishes pikmin the way he started it: doing everything optimally, as suboptimally as possible...

&: The S.S. Dolpin? More like the S.S. Suboptimal.

[lawatson]

Well played! That final boss sure was beaten the raocow way. Anyways, that was a pretty solid blind playthrough! It was fun to watch Rao's mindset and tactical knowledge slowly develop. Pikmin 2 is probably one of my all-time favorite GameCube games, so I'm stoked for whenever that happens.

[Shard1697]

after replaying this yesterday my genuine opinion is still that, for your average player, the bomb strat is not worth it due to how fiddly it is to select the bomb carrying pikmin in this game.
in the wii version where they let you switch the pikmin you're holding it works fine, but in the original it is super cumbersome

raocow said something in this fight which indicated he didn't know why the pikmin were running at his legs, but: the way pikmin work is that once you throw them at something or steer them into it with c-stick, they are assigned the 'job' of attacking that enemy, and are no longer part of your party.
if you want them to do anything else(like dodge big lethal attacks), you need to whistle them back again

[camwoodstock]

&: One thing we want someone to make is a graph showing the progression of Olimar's Pikmin Tallies across the days. Granted, that graph is gonna look *ugly* on the final day slide, oops... ;P

&: And then we just, Did It Ourselves, Anyways. This obviously only looks at the end-of-day stats, not necessarily any changes mid-day. So stuff like Day 14 is a *lot* less intense on this chart. Also, the tallies for Day 24 are courtesy of Beta Squared, and may not be fully accurate? :O

[Grounder]

"That'll hold him alright, heheheheheheh.

Phooey!"

Memes aside, Purple, Grey (kinda) and Pink (not under that name) Pikmin appear in future titles, leaving the other colors as complete mysteries.

I do at least imagine the teal Pikmin are saltwater ones, as opposed to the presumably freshwater Blue ones.

[Shard1697]

by the way it's very funny how the reveal of the final part makes olimar retroactively a huge asshole for sticking around longer than he needs to to snag some cash

[kitikami]

I was rooting for those two red Pikmin to make it all the way to the end, but no, war is a terrible thing.