Pikmin 3 made its second appearance at an E3 after debuting last year, and the second time around, it was even more impressive. Highlighting the mission mode in both single-player and co-op forms, as well as the neat one-versus-one Bingo Battle, a lot of the NWR staff finally came around on this game and hopped on the Pikmin hype train.

While the GamePad controls are still rough, the Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk controls are, as far as we can tell, spot on. With new Pikmin, three astronauts to work with, and plenty of challenges, Pikmin 3 looks to be an impressive experience at a glance. We'll find out for sure on August 4 when it hits Wii U.

Here's a snippet of Jonathan Metts' E3 2013 impressions:

Having played Pikmin 3 demos at back-to-back E3s, I'd say the game has come a long way in the past year. Nintendo wised up this year and gave me a Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk right away, noting that their teams vastly prefer this setup (though joystick/button play is also supported on both GamePad and Pro controllers). It's worth noting that you have fairly little camera control in the pointer scheme; a tap of the Nunchuk's Z button will simply re-center behind your lead character. One new feature lets you target an enemy or item by pointing the cursor at it and holding Z; then, you can shake the Nunchuk to send every Pikmin at the target in one huge, all-out strike.

The ten-minute single player demo offers a choice between two levels -- one that's similar to what we played in 2012, and one new, more difficult one. I chose the latter and was given the standard goal of collecting as many items as possible. Each piece of fruit, enemy carcass, or pellet generates new Pikmin sproutlings, and some of the real-world items are gold-colored with a coin value displayed. The quantity and value of items gathered is shown at completion of each level, and a demo rep told me that these may be posted to an online leaderboard for comparison with your friends' scores. Take that with a grain of salt, for now. (The game still appears to have no online multiplayer, which is really frustrating.)