Pikmin 3 Nature

Pikmin 3 is getting so close that we can almost smell the flowers, right before we ruthlessly hurl Pikmin at them. It arrives in Europe on 26th July and North America on 4th August, and we shouldn't forget that fans of the GameCube originals have been demanding this new title since the early Wii days. Nintendo's taken its sweet time.

While plenty of gamers are likely to opt for the traditional physical retail version, a good number may decide to download it from the eShop. The good news is that, assuming you have a Deluxe / Premium model, you won't necessarily have to hook up an external hard drive to pick it up. We can confirm that our European copy — we expect the North American equivalent to be identical or very close — takes up 3950MB of space, which is just over 3.85GB. It'll just about fit on the 8GB model if you've downloaded very little, but will have a decent chance on the 32GB equivalent if you've been picky about eShop games so far; if you do have an external hard drive, than you're surely wallowing in free space.

If you treat every individual Pikmin as a "bit" of data, that means the game's file size accommodates 31,600 of the little creatures. Consider that to be your useless trivia of the day.

So, how many of you are planning to download, and do you have enough room for it on your system?