Viva Pinata - Best Game Evah?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 13, 2006, 2:38 am

Nope!

But it's different...as in I think Rare was on crack when they made this game. It appears to be a kid's game but can test anyone's sims/rts skills.

I played it for a few hours tonight.

The game looks great. Extremely colorful. It's cartoon eye candy. The camera and UI are excellent. It's easy to navigate around to all the things you'll need while playing the game. The camera axis is "normal" (opposite of what XXFII is) but you can switch both axis depending on how you like it. All games should give you camera axis options. Your view is third person but you can rotate the camera to a pretty high level so you're looking down at your garden or rotate to a lower angle that's more first person.

Hard to explain this game. Creepy comes to mind. It's supposed to be a kids game but basically it's growing things in your garden that attract pinatas and then breeding those pinatas to attract more advanced and colorful pinatas. It's creepy in that your main tool is a shovel and you can whack a Pinata until you kill it and then all the other pinatas run over and eat the candy that comes out...kinda cannibalistic.

To breed your pinatas, they need to be in "romance mode". To do this, they need to meed certain criteria...like having eaten a certain amount of other pinatas or plants, fruits, veggies, seeds, etc. There are cut scenes that show your pinatas "romancing" which would be fucking in any other game.

There are creepy helper people wearing masks that guide you and provide services like build love shacks for your pinatas to screw, er romance in. There is a store where you can buy various items like new seeds, building materials like fences (to keep out predator pinatas), various foods to keep your pinatas happy or to get them into romance mode, and sell your goods.

At anytime, you can whack a pinata and receive money for it by killing it. Your shovel also smashes junk in your garden and clears land so you can plant grass, etc.

There's a lot of shit going on and I don't see how a kid could deal with it all...although, it doesn't seem like too many bad things happen if you take your time. Once in awhile a plant will start to die if it's not watered. As the game goes on, you level up and improve your gardening skills. Your shovel gets upgraded so it can do more things...the first upgrade is allowing you to dig holes for your seed which speeds up their growth. I guess the goal is to keep breeding pinatas to get better, more colorful ones, fancier plants, etc

I had to get some bird type pinatas to eat some of my worm pinatas to get them into romance mode. There is also "romance candy" which gets your pinatas back in the mood if they start losing interest.

There are predators you need to take care of and sometime all it takes is whacking them with a shovel to stop them from eating your pinatas.

The information available in this game is outstanding. It's easy to get to encyclopedias describing various items in the game and letting you know how to improve them or change their status. There are alert messages that pop up in the lower right corner of the screen letting you know things that are taking place.

The voices are ok. Pretty simple talk but they try to be funny.

Anyone that likes sims or rts type games will like this game. I think some RTS and Sims games might steal some of the controller functions from this game in the future.

There is day and night in the game and the clock moves fast.

I'm not sure what to think of this game except to say that it's extremely well made. It's an RTS/Sims type game but I think they're going to lose sales because it's hard to tell wtf it is from the title and also will lose adult sales because it looks like a kid's game although it will challenge anyone. Everything about it is well done, it just depends if you will enjoy what that gameplay is. Perhaps rent before buying on this one.

If they put out a demo for this game, try if for sure! Bright and Colorful.

*~*stragi*~* · Post by ***~*stragi*~*** » November 13, 2006, 2:42 am

why did you play this

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 13, 2006, 2:45 am

*~*stragi*~* wrote:why did you play this

Because I'm waiting to hire you or some illegal alien to level up my secondary characters in FFXII.

*~*stragi*~* · Post by ***~*stragi*~*** » November 13, 2006, 3:05 am

i can't stand ff12 and marvel ultimate alliance/gow is taking up all my gaming time!

kyoukan · Post by **kyoukan** » November 13, 2006, 5:22 am

wow, you even steal kid's games.

on a scale of 1 to 10, how boring is your life?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 13, 2006, 6:15 am

I know it's less boring than someone that stalks people on a forum.

I'd steal a senior citizen game as well if there was one. I'm crazy like that! Life on the edge! Give me a fucking retirement Sim and I'll PWN it! Do I sacrifice the new blue hairdo for next month's supply of Depends or risk pissing myself and look good at the BINGO social event of the year?

We can't all have rich spouses that we mooch off of. You still have something hanging off your chin from last month's payout favors.

Get back to me when you contribute half as much as me to the entertainment media industry. Throw out your hacked PS2, Xbox and hard drive full of torrents while you're at it you hypocritical dolt. You glow bright moron every time you attempt this flame. The only reason you haven't hacked your 360 is that you're too stupid and need to wait for the retard version. Even then, you hack for pure piracy and not for the home brew software possibilities due to the aforementioned retard factor that will forever prevent it from going beyond stealing for you and becoming an enthusiast's hobby.

Fenna · Post by **Fenna** » November 13, 2006, 12:36 pm

I actually watched the Viva Pinata cartoon this past Saturday morning, without having read much about the game. I'm still confused by what I saw.

There were pinatas all lined up, walking up some plank to a tall tower with machinery being operated by other pinatas. A pinata would walk up the plank and be x-rayed to determine how full of candy it was. If it was full, it would then be hurled from a giant catapult off into the horizon. This was, apparently, a good thing, as the other pinatas were hoping for the same treatment.

WTF

Kwonryu DragonFist · November 13, 2006, 2:39 pm

One Word: WEIRD!

PS. Gotta check this one out

kyoukan · Post by **kyoukan** » November 13, 2006, 3:45 pm

Winnow wrote:I know it's less boring than someone that stalks people on a forum.

I'd steal a senior citizen game as well if there was one. I'm crazy like that! Life on the edge! Give me a fucking retirement Sim and I'll PWN it! Do I sacrifice the new blue hairdo for next month's supply of Depends or risk pissing myself and look good at the BINGO social event of the year?

We can't all have rich spouses that we mooch off of. You still have something hanging off your chin from last month's payout favors.

Get back to me when you contribute half as much as me to the entertainment media industry. Throw out your hacked PS2, Xbox and hard drive full of torrents while you're at it you hypocritical dolt. You glow bright moron every time you attempt this flame. The only reason you haven't hacked your 360 is that you're too stupid and need to wait for the retard version. Even then, you hack for pure piracy and not for the home brew software possibilities due to the aforementioned retard factor that will forever prevent it from going beyond stealing for you and becoming an enthusiast's hobby.

So we'll say an 8 as in you'll gleefully pirate a kid's game and write a shitty review on it on a forum where nobody particularly likes you if you're not feeding them free comics, but not quite so boring that you don't have the time to do more than copy and paste your last "flame" towards me?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 13, 2006, 4:15 pm

I was listening to this week's 1Up podcast at lunch and two of the reviewers had been playing Viva Pinata. Both of them like the game but had some funny comments.

"It has packaging that no grown man would buy"

Pretty funny but they had another angle on the game that made sense. Adults with children can't really play Gears of War in front of their kids (well if they're responsible adults at least) but an adult game disguised as a kid's game with colorful creatures is something you can play during the day without upsetting young kids etc. and is somewhat entertaining just to watch even if the kids aren't playing it. Makes sense. A lot of Viva Pinata has two levels of humor and game play that will be funny to adults but kids won't notice. I think it's a nice move by Rave/Microsoft to offer a game like this although they should offer the game in two different packages perhaps to attract more of the adult gamer population.

The 1Up reviewers were having a great time with the game while at the same time making fun of its "breeding" based goals and how it gets incestuous etc.

Anyways, nice to see something different. In this case, WTF is a good thing.

cadalano · Post by **cadalano** » November 13, 2006, 4:40 pm

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 13, 2006, 5:01 pm

exactly!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 17, 2006, 1:01 am

1UP gave this game a 9/10

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3155297

If your gardening is successful, and you're leveling up every 20 minutes or so, there will come a point several hours in where you're told that there are too many piñatas in your square of paradise. That's when it hits you. You can sell piñatas for cash. But how can you part with them? You've spent so long tending to their every need, naming them, accessorizing them with goofy glasses and stupid-looking fake teeth, all while providing them with the perfect habitat. You can box some of them up and send them to friends on your buddy list to earn an achievement, but it's not really a practical solution. So you sell a Whirlm, just to see what happens. When poor little Willy the Whirlm goes for 100 coins, you can't help but feel a tinge of guilt. Have you somehow failed the Whilrm population?

Of course not. Willy's brothers and sisters will happily shag each other senseless to make more Whirlms with minimal encouragement -- so essentially, they're a source of endless income. All you really have to do is ensure that more than two of them are wiggling around at all times, and you have a sure thing on your hands. This is where that "purity of benevolence" thing starts to slip away. Success requires calculated evil. Before you know it, you have a walled-in Whirlm concentration camp, and you're no longer naming the little guys -- you're just letting the game number them automatically. As you force Whirlms 27 and 28 to breed for the last time, before sacrificing them to the coffers, it dawns on you. Wait...Sparrowmints like to eat Whirlms, don't they? So much so that it makes them horny. If you breed the little wrigglers as food, you can feed them to the birds, get them to mate and sell their offspring for three times the profit! Wait...is that evil? Who cares?!

Emotional engagement in games is unusual, to put it mildly. For something to tug on the heartstrings to the degree that this does is simply stunning. Viva Piñata is an emotional sandbox unlike anything else, because its morality isn't simply a binary choice between good and evil. The freedom it affords allows you to mess with your own head and examine your own ethics as you slowly move the line of what you feel is "acceptable" in order to succeed. Sure, you can play it dispassionately -- but to do so is to deny yourself of its brilliance.

Within viva Pinata, Rare takes a jab at Sony. You have to watch this video to understand it. A guy is talking about the game Genji 2 recreating battles that actually took place in ancient Japan and then a giant crab pops into to scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQq6gm9R23o

Inside Viva Pinata, you see this:

Small jab at Sony but funny nonetheless!

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » January 1, 2007, 10:19 pm

I picked it up yesterday with a gift certificate I got for christmas.

Played it for about 3-4 hours and have started 2 gardens already(max of 8 per profile). Enjoying playing this more than I thought I would.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » January 17, 2007, 6:50 pm

This game is the debil!

I finally got it working so my 360 won't freeze while playing it. this was the only game that made my machine freeze. Had to strap an Intercooler to my 360 to make it stop.

For 2 night in a row now I've played this game, losing track of time and have gone to bed past 2 am.

Getting these little fuckers to come to your garden, procreate and not die to the hazards that just walk through the place is getting to be an obsession.

Then you find out that you you're trying to breed 2 seperate types of pinata that natually hate each other and they're always at each other's throats as well. Gah! Makes me want to take out the shovel and whack em all dead.

It's a real nice change of pace from shooters and sports titles.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » January 17, 2007, 7:47 pm

Animalor wrote: Getting these little fuckers to come to your garden, procreate and not die to the hazards that just walk through the place is getting to be an obsession.

Then you find out that you you're trying to breed 2 seperate types of pinata that natually hate each other and they're always at each other's throats as well. Gah! Makes me want to take out the shovel and whack em all dead.

It's a real nice change of pace from shooters and sports titles.

Yeah, my friend and I were trying to create a Bunny Comb breeding concentration camp as they sell for good money. I had a little corner of the garden fenced off, just big enough for new Bunny Combs to stand and eat. For some reason they wouldn't breed. At first, we thought it was the inhumane camp we had set up but it turned out that if you have Preztails around, Bunny Combs won't do the deed.

We ended up breeding Fudgehogs but they were a lot more finicky.

Great game. It can get overwhelming but even when it does, you won't lose control as the garden will sort of correct itself for good or bad.