After looking around the Gaming Chat forum I found no traces of a legitimate thread dedicated to Pikmin, so I figured I would make my own.

Pikmin is a real-time strategy and action game released by Nintendo in late 2001. Pikmin 2 was soon released in 2004, and the upcoming Pikmin 3 is expected to be released in summer of 2013.

Pikmin
You play as Captain Olimar, a tiny extraterrestrial from the planet Hocotate. The story starts when Olimar is taking an intergalactic vacation in outer space. However, during his flight, a comet hits his spaceship and crash lands on an uncharted planet. Parts of the spaceship fall off as it plummets to the ground before impact. When he regains consciousness, Olimar finds out that the planet's atmosphere contains high levels of oxygen, an element deadly to his people, and he can stay on the planet for only 30 days before his life support system stops functioning. Olimar must retrieve many of the spaceship parts so he can rebuild his spaceship and return to Hocotate. To help Olimar are indigenous creatures called Pikmin, which are nearly extinct and unable to survive in the environment without his leadership when he arrives.

Pikmin 2
After escaping the distant planet in the first game, Captain Olimar returns to his home planet Hocotate to learn that the company he works for, Hocotate Freight, is in severe debt, after a payload of golden carrots was supposedly stolen. Because of this debt, the company was forced to sell everything, including Olimar's ship. Shocked, Olimar drops the bottle cap that he brought back from the planet as a gift to his co-worker Louie. The nearby Hocotate Ship determines that the bottle cap Olimar retrieved from the distant planet has a considerable value of 100 pokos. The company president, hearing this, decides to send Olimar and his co-worker Louie to seek out the planet where they quickly reunite with the Pikmin creatures, who help in scavenging the treasures, in order to pay off the debt.

Has anyone else played this game when they were younger? I can say without a doubt that this was one of my favorite games of all time, and I wish to know what others thought of it.
If you haven't played it before, and you wish to try it for yourself, I would suggest finding a Gamecube emulator and Pikmin ROM for your PC. I do not necessarily condone this, but not everyone has a Gamecube anymore, and copies of the game are worth significantly more than other popular titles.