Welcome back to The Nintendo Report, where we’re looking back at all of Nintendo’s intellectual properties in alphabetical order to see how they’re doing. Even though we covered two letters last time (N and O) it was still a pretty short list. But we don’t have that problem today! This time, we’re looking at the letter P, and it’s a big one. So let’s get started, shall we? Oh, and before you ask, no, Professor Layton isn’t on the list. That one’s wholly owned by Level 5. Alright, it's time for The Nintendo Report! 

Pandora's Tower

This is an odd property if there ever was one. As I understand it, this game came about after Nintendo was impressed with developer Ganbarion’s work. They offered to let them make an original IP for the Wii, and what they eventually came up with was Pandora’s Tower. It’s a weird, dark little action game that involves feeding demon flesh to your ladyfriend so she doesn’t go super evil… or something. It's unusual, that's for sure, but it’s also pretty cool! 

Health rating: Basically Dead

Pandora's Tower was a bit of a controversial title, but not because of its content. It was part of Operation Rainfall, a fan campaign to get a number of Wii games localized and released in the West. In the end, the games did wind up coming out here (Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora's Tower) but while Xenoblade obviously went on to become a huge franchise, the other two didn’t. There hasn’t been a peep out of the Pandora's Tower brand since it came out, and I don’t expect that to change. 

Picross

Ahh, my beloved Picross. I adore this series. It’s basically a picture crossword puzzle, hence the name. It’s developed by Jupiter Corporation. It got its start all the way back on the Game Boy in 1995 with Mario’s Picross, where it, well, didn’t exactly take off. Not here in North America, anyway. It did pretty well elsewhere! 

Health rating: Great

See, while Mario’s Picross didn’t set the world on fire here, it got a bunch of followups in Japan! Then, a solid 13 years after its Game Boy debut, we finally got another Picross game stateside in the form of Picross DS, and the rest is history. There were a ton of digital games released on the 3DS eShop, and even more now on the Switch. I couldn’t be happier to say that Picross is as healthy as they come. 

Pikmin

Pikmin started out on the GameCube from designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and you better believe Nintendo put some weight behind that! It’s a game about cute little astronauts landing on distant worlds and befriending weird little plant people called Pikmin who help them out and sacrifice their lives in distressing numbers to battle monsters that get in your way. Think of it as Nintendo’s take on real-time strategy. If you’ve never played it, it’s way more wonderful than I’m making it sound. 

Health rating: Great

Pikmin started off… okay. The original game performed pretty well by GameCube standards, which warranted a followup on the same platform. But then, Pikmin went away for a while. Sort of. There were rumors of a Pikmin 3 for ages, but the Wii generation only got remasters of the original 2 games with some admittedly excellent Wii Remote controls added in. Then Pikmin 3 landed on Wii U, and it did well by Wii U standards, though it once again failed to truly catch on. But then the Switch happened. Pikmin 3 was re-released and sold over twice as well as it did on Wii U, and the eventual Pikmin 4 did even better. Pikmin is here to stay. 

Pilotwings

Pilotwings is a flight simulation game created to show off the unbridled awesomeness of the Super NES’s Mode 7 scaling and rotation. And it was fantastic. Basically, you’d go through various flight schools and use different vehicles to accomplish various objectives. Fly through rings with a plane. Fly through rings with a rocket pack. Fly through rings while skydiving. Blow up a secret enemy base with a helicopter. Yeah, that last one’s always felt a little out of place. 

Health rating: Could Be Better

Pilotwings performed a similar function with the launch of the N64, complementing Super Mario 64 the same way the original did Super Mario World. Then it went dormant for a while. It looked like it was on its way back for the Wii thanks to a plane flying tech demo, but that wound up getting incorporated into Wii Sports Resort instead. The last new game in the franchise was Pilotwings Resort for 3DS. The series has seen numerous re-releases, and all three soundtracks were recently added to the Nintendo Music app, so they clearly haven't forgotten about it, but it’s been way too long since we’ve had a proper new game. Hopefully that changes soon.  

Pinball

Nintendo’s first pinball game was the 1983 Game & Watch title Pinball. More famously though was the black box NES game Pinball which featured a super fun minigame starring Mario and Pauline. It’s video game pinball with that unmistakable Nintendo charm! 

Health rating: Difficult to say

Nintendo has since been involved in a whole heck of a lot of pinball projects, some of which involve their biggest brands like Mario, Pokemon, and Kirby. There was a Super Pinball for Super NES, Galactic Pinball for Virtual Boy, and even Metroid Prime Pinball for Nintendo DS which was actually really good! That was the last wholly original pinball game they were involved in as far as I can tell, unless you count Odama, which we talked about last time and is very much its own animal. I’d like to think Nintendo will be involved in another pinball project one of these days, but this one’s too tough to call for sure. 

Play Action Football

That’s right, Nintendo used to have their very own Football game! Technically, they developed 10-Yard Fight for NES, but that was an adaptation of an IREM arcade game, and Nintendo has no ownership over it as far as I can tell. Nintendo's own series started in 1990 on the NES with NES Play Action Football, which reviewed and sold pretty well. 

Health rating: Basically Dead

A Game Boy port simply called Play Action Football released later that same year, and the Super NES got an iteration in the form of Super Play Action Football, but that’s it. Once the Madden Football series took off, I have to assume Nintendo just didn’t see the need for their own football game anymore. We haven’t heard from the series since its 2007 Wii Virtual Console release, and honestly, I think that’s a dang shame. The world of video game football needs some proper competition, and I bet Nintendo could put together one heck of a game if they wanted to. 

Pokemon

HA! Do we really need to talk about this one? 

Health rating: Great

EverDrive-GB X7 (Ruby)

$157.99

This is the Ruby version of the EverDrive-GB X7. This cartridge comes assembled in a translucent red shell with your choice of label.… read more

Pokemon is one of, if not THE biggest entertainment brand on the planet. I could talk about the sad state of their recent releases doing damage to the series reputation, but sadly that’s just not true. Pokemon’s unstoppable. 

Polarium

Polarium is an interesting little puzzle game that showed up during the early days of the Nintendo DS. It was developed by the now-defunct Mitchell Corp, and while it didn’t exactly top the charts, it was pretty well liked by the folks who played it. You used the DS touch screen to draw connected lines to switch white blocks to black and vice versa to solve puzzles. 

Health rating: Basically dead

Polarium was ported to the Game Boy Advance, which is kind of weird for a DS game, a year after it was released on the DS. Outside of that, though, Polarum hasn’t done much of anything outside of a re-release of Polarum Advance on the Wii U virtual Console. As always, this is Nintendo and you can never truly declare anything dead with 100% certainty, but I’d be surprised if we ever saw this one again. 

Pro Wrestling

Originally released on the NES back in 1987, Pro Wrestling loomed large here in North America. I suspect it was fairly popular in Japan as well, but professional wrestling here in the US was absolutely enormous back then. This game wasn’t licensed by the WWF or anything, though. It had an original cast of characters, and it played better than any wrestling game out there at the time. 

Health rating: Basically dead

Unfortunately, Pro Wrestling just kind of disappeared after its release, along with all of its lovable characters. The Amazon, Star Man, Great Panther, all gone. The game’s designer was Masato Masuda, who later became known for the Fire Pro Wrestling games, so maybe it was his lack of involvement that kept Nintendo from following this one up, but that’s just my best guess. The true reasons remain a mystery. It did finally get re-released as part of the Switch’s NSO service, but that’s it. One NES game, one re-release, and it’s done. I’d love to see it return, and I know I’m not alone, but it seems unlikely. 

Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!! is a boxing game that’s really a puzzle game. It’s also one of Nintendo’s oldest franchises, having started its life in arcades back in 1984. It was a rather sizable hit there with its unusual dual screen setup, but the franchise didn’t really hit it big until the NES release of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. It quickly became one of Nintendo’s most popular games, as well as one of the pioneers of the early speed running community. 

Health rating: Could be better

Punch-Out!! Is clearly one of those brands that Nintendo cares about, as it gets referenced a lot, even today. Unfortunately its last original release was 2009’s Punch-Out!! for Wii. (Technically you could say Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!! was the last original game in the series, but I consider that more of a bonus chapter of Punch-Out!! Wii) Regardless, Punch-Out!! Has been rather quiet for about 15 years, which is way too long between entries for my liking. It’s not dead, because I don’t imagine this is the kind of game Nintendo will ever truly forget about, but it could use some love. 

Pushmo

Originally launched on the 3DS, Pushmo is an adorable puzzle platformer that involves a cute little Sumo cloud thing named Mallow (who is not related to Mallow in Super Mario RPG) pushing and pulling things to get to the top of various structures.

Health rating: Not so good

Pushmo wound up getting a number of sequels, the most recent of which was 2015’s Stretchmo for 3DS. Sure, it’s been about 10 years, but I’ve seen Nintendo franchises come back from way worse dry spells than that. It was never an enormous success, so it’s hard to say for sure that it’ll come back, but I feel confident it’ll show up one of these days.  

Puzzle League

This series is known as Panel de Pon in Japan, but wound up with the prestigious Tetris name being attached to it for its US release, Tetris Attack. It really doesn’t have anything to do with Tetris, but as a puzzle game, it’s truly one of the greats. 

Health rating: Could be better

The most recent version of Puzzle League was actually built into Animal Crossing: New Leaf for 3DS, which is kind of odd. That was 2016, and I have to say, Nintendo hasn’t been super keen on releasing standalone puzzle games lately, with the exception of Picross. I doubt Puzzle League is dead, but who knows if or when we’ll see an actual new entry. 

And that wraps up another Nintendo Report. Quite the diverse lineup, and one that’s a bit more healthy than I expected at first glance. That’s always a good thing! I don’t believe Nintendo has any Q properties, so we’ll be moving right along to R. In the meantime, what are your favorite Nintendo games that start with the letter P? Did I miss anything? Let us know. See you next time in The Nintendo Report.