The European release
Open Nectar now runs the PAL disc, and that means it now runs in Spanish, French, German and Italian as well as English.
Nothing is translated by this project: the European disc ships all five languages, and the game has always known how to use them. What was missing was a port that could be built for that release at all — the game's own code is compiled here, and it is conditional on which release it came from in four hundred places.
The installer recognises which disc you gave it and installs the matching build. If the disc carries more than one language it asks which you want to play in, and every language is installed regardless, so changing your mind later is a menu row and not a reinstall. F1 → Language.
The choice is written to your settings, so it survives.
Widescreen
The HUD no longer stretches to fill a 16:9 frame. It is drawn in a wide space with its pieces anchored where they belong — life on the left, the sun bar centred, counters and the day to the right — so the world can be genuinely wide without the interface being pulled out of shape or leaving dark bands at the sides.
And things at the edges stop disappearing. The 3D view was already wide, but what the game decided was worth drawing was still being worked out in 4:3: Pikmin, creatures, objects and particles vanished as they crossed where the old frame's edge used to be. They stay now.
If you preferred the interface boxed in 4:3, PIKMIN_MENU_PILLARBOX=1 puts the menus back.
Fixes
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Accented characters were drawing as garbage. Any letter above plain ASCII indexed backwards out of the font table and produced a black box full of Japanese glyphs. English text almost never leaves ASCII, which is why it took the Spanish release to expose it but the fault was in the port, not in any one language.
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The permadeath prompt did not appear on an empty memory card. It asked when a save file existed but had never been used, and stayed quiet in the most ordinary case there is: your very first file. This affects the USA release too, and has since permadeath was added.
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Cutscenes are no longer blurred. Depth of field follows the captain, and a cutscene puts the camera wherever the scene wants it often with him out of shot entirely — so the whole frame fell outside the focus. It stands down during cutscenes now.
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The rectangle around every window frame is gone. 0.4 drew a faint box around dialogue icons and message windows. It came from a texture format being read one way for the attract movies and another way by everything else; the movies now do their own colour conversion and leave the rest of the game alone.
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The attract movies really do play. In 0.4 they could go black. A post-processing pass was unbinding the shader without saying so, and the next thing drawn quietly failed — which for a movie meant a black screen with sound.
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Deapth of Field graphical glitches
Still the same
You supply your own copy of Pikmin. No game data ships here. Supported discs: USA Rev 1 and Europe