Monkeys with a gooey candy center

[Zeta]

So after months of wanting it like oxygen, I finally found a place that rents out Viva Pinata while staying at my stepfather's house, who possses an Xbox 360. This has to be the most original game I've played since Katamari Damacy.

The game premise itself is fairly difficult to explain. Basically you start out with a crappy patch of land on an island inhabited by wild animals that happen to be animated pinatas. Depending on how you decorate your garden, you attract different wild pinatas to live in your garden. Then you breed them and sell the babies for money. Breeding them together and raising new types of plants also gives you experience points, which attracts more expensive and impressive species of pinata. Pinatas aren't always able to live together in harmony though, so you'll have to be careful of your valuable pinatas becoming part of the food chain. Also, jerks in masks will come to poison your pinatas, and there are "sour" pinatas that come to kill yours, but can be tamed under certain conditions.

The game's graphics are really impressive. There are 59 different species Pinata. each with their own detailed house (inside and out), mating dance, expressions, and four different colors. They each also have their own dietary habits dictating what they want to eat, and sometimes what they're eaten by. Many of these little details really enrich the game in amusing ways, because a lot of the little things about the pinatas are clever British-humor style jokes. For instance, to mate two pinatas together, you must navigate a maze of sorts representing the sperm making its way to the female's egg. The Bat's maze is a pair of cricket bats and a ball. The frog's maze is a revamp of frogger. The monkeys live in barrels, and the bats' house is a belfry. It's these visual details that make the game a treat to just look at, and often the excitement is just trying to get all the pinatas so you can see what their house and mating dance looks like.

Each Pinata species also has their own mating dance, done to a different style of song each time. My personal favorite was the duck's sea shanty dance.

Basically, the game simulates the job of a zoo keeper on a more micromanaged level than games like zoo tycoon. The only thing I can even compare it to is Seaman and Animal Crossing by way of Katamari Damacy. At $30 bucks, I suggest anyone who likes simulation games a try.

There are some complaints with the game. Despite the animated TV-tie in and 4Kids trying to turn it into their next Pokemon, this game is NOT simple. It would in fact be entirely impossible for anyone the cartoon would amuse to actually complete this game. This is the worst case of a miss-marketed game EVER. Behind the cutesy facade, there's a lot of black humor, injokes, violence, and even implied sex that simply don't mesh well with the same crowd that enjoys Pokemon. In fact, the game is just TOO damn hard on some occassions, and fulfilling the requirements to get some of the rarer pinatas such as the swan, crocodile, wolf, flying pig, and lemur are damn near impossible. The eagle alone for instance, requires you to raise worms to feed to a sparrow to mutate into a canary to feed to a buzzard to feed to the EAGLE, and that's just one of their requirements. Some of the pinatas have hidden requirements, making the game nearly impossible to complete without a FAQ, something I haven't seen in a long time. There's also the game's biggest flaw - pianatas can't walk through eachother. While this doesn't sound like a flaw at first, many pinatas can get stuck for 15 minutes at a time in a full garden, trying to walk through eachother or an expensive structure that has to be torn down and rebuilt just so you can free them from eternal stasis. These glitches usually resolve themselves however, and aside from them this is a VERY polished game and I'm very sad to hear it didn't do so well. I would've loved to see a Viva Pinata 2 with a lower difficulty, but a bigger choice of creatures to lure into one's garden.

So yeah, if you have an Xbox 360, you owe it to yourself to check this thing out.

[Ngangbius]

I endorsed this game months ago, and yeah, it is good. However, I do wish that the gardens were bigger. It's really annoying to have a message pop-up before you are about to get a new vistor or lay down a fence, or even plant a tree to state that you ran out of space. Ha ha.

Before I played this game, I was under the impression that you could have as many animals, objects, and other junk in some huge Pinata world you can create. It's disappointing that the game feels limited in this way.

[Green Gibbon!]

I played the demo kind of hoping for something chill, but everything happens too fast. It seems like there's way too much going on at any given time, like the game is too busy for its own good. I only played it for about half an hour, but I didn't care for it.

[Light Speed]

I played the demo for a good hour and a half or so. I was under the impression it was the full game, you just couldn't save, but I dunno. It was fun, but I agree with Gibbon that theres just too much shit to worry about. That's part of the reason I can't stand RTS games anymore. Also I could see myself spending hours working on a garden that I didn't really want to spend time doing. It seemed more addicting than fun to me. I also agree with Zeta that this game is definately not simple enough for children. I'm guessing the marketing department and the developers had completely different ideas for what this game was. Marketing probably just saw pretty pinatas and thought this is what we need to get children into the 360!

[Ngangbius]

The game really does go too fast in the first few hours. That's because they are introducing so many things at once such as new tools, techniques, and characters, and at lower garden levels, there are few requirements to obtain new pinatas.

The game does slow down at a manageable pace after that.

[Double-S-]

I played the demo and it was the most boring thing I've touched in several years.

[Tsuyoshi-kun]

Even worse than Sonic 2006? That was the worst demo of anything I've ever played in my life.

[Ngangbius]

I haven't played the VP demo, but it sure as hell couldn't be as terrible as Sonic 2K6's. Especially seeing that the full game of VP is pretty good.