Theme Reversal

Theme Reversal

Michael Lin

Game 101-004

     This paper is about taking a game and changing its general theme without touching the rules at all. For this paper, I chose the game Pikmin and the theme of Starcraft or aliens in general. The game Pikmin is a strategy game where the player controls a single character in a 3D top-down setting. The object of the game is to survive at most 30 days and to collect enough pieces to repair the main characters spaceship to fly back to his planet. To help him are small NPC animals called Pikmin, who he is able to throw and come in three varieties. Red Pikmin, who are like the default Pikmin that are fire resistant. Blue Pikmin, that are able to live in water while the others aren't. And Yellow Pikmin, which are able to carry explosive rocks. During the day, the main character Olimar is able to harvest pellets with Pikmin and grow more Pikmin by having them bring the pellet back to a base. Pikmin can also be used to attack enemies that come in many different sizes, and require a directly proportional amount of Pikmin to defeat. So Olimar must use the Pikmin to achieve his main goal of retrieving parts for his spaceship before his life support systems run out. But Olimar and the Pikmin are only able to operate during the day, because at night time there are nocturnal predators that come out and eat Pikmin.

     The theme I chose to mold Pikmin to was Starcraft, or aliens in general. In Starcraft, there is a unit called the Swarm Host that can host many smaller aliens and have them attack something. The Swarm Host will take the place of Olimar, and will be able to spawn its "Pikmin," or Zerglings, Banelings, and Mutalisks. Zerglings take the place of the red Pikmin, because Zerglings are just about the most basic unit for the Zerg race with no special abilities. Banelings take the place of yellow Pikmin because they are able to explode, like the bomb rocks in Pikmin. Mutalisks take the place of blue Pikmin, because they are able to fly. Starcraft didn't have water so I had to substitute terrain that the other two "Pikmin" were not able to move across. The main goal for the rewrite of Pikmin would be to collect enough Xel'Naga relics to research and develop a resistance to the Xel'Naga weapons, before the humans are able to collect all the artifact pieces and charge it to kill the Zerg. The pellets that the Pikmin have to collect are easily substituted by minerals and vespene gas that has to be collected in the RTS Starcraft, and all units can satisfy the drone role from Starcraft. In the Starcraft 2 storyline, there were Zerg infested humans that were only active at night, and were burned by daylight, much like vampires. But since that would be Zerg attacking Zerg, infested humans can be replaced by headcrab controlled humans from the Half-Life universe.