Viva Pinata Pocket Paradise

Review from George - Thursday, 06 November 2008 @ 12:26am

Between trying to finish Dead Space, playing the COD5 beta religiously, working full time, and the general in and outs of living… I have scattered, sporadic or little to no time slots to fit a Viva Pinata DS review in. But having put my hand up to review it, only to realise what I had actually just said, and not being able to withdraw my application, I faltered through my now somewhat melancholic state to put my stylis to DS, and breed brightly coloured paper animals.

But this did present a small problem. Time. I have none. So I thought, and thought, and thought… Then 17 seconds later I realised I had 40 minutes of free time a day, that was otherwise wasted staring at suspicious looking people sitting across from me.

This 40 minutes of course, is the time I spend 6 days a week travelling to and from work… On public transport.

So it was decided. I would spend that the time, usually reserved for doing nothing, to reviewing a game I have already clocked 30+ hours with on the 360 version.

Now for those of you who are familiar with the game, you either bought the Forza+ Vivia Pinata Xbox 360 package, or you saw it and thought, “ Why not?” For the remaining percentage- You are given a square patch of land, to which you are to plant, dig, breed, and manage. Breed the piñata, not the garden, that seems a slightly impossible task. As you progress through the game, you’re given greater access to items, food, and of course ,you attract more living paper mache animals.

Viva Pinata/Fallout 3 cross promotion

Like all modern games, there is a training section. In this particular game, you’re guided by a very polite pink and purple horse. According to someone I work with ‘ The gayest thing he’s ever seen.’ I would now like to contradict that with ‘ One of the most inventive things I’ve seen, maybe.’ After learning how to feed your piñatas, attract them then build their houses, you’re shown how to make them breed. I say make, because you can deicide who breeds with who. Only within their own species though. Trust me, I did try to make a half worm, half bird piñata. This only resulted in the worm being eaten, then the bird going off to mate with his partner. Oddly enough, that pinata’s actions can actually be reflected in almost every living species.

After graduating from gardeners college you are then handed the responsibility of owning and being caretaker of your very own garden. Probably having to dish out 300,000 K just to look at a garden in Melbourne, I felt a subtle joy knowing I owned, could build whatever I wanted, and water my garden outside of the level 2a water restrictions without pretending to of accidently turned my sprinkler system on whenever my neighbours happened to walk past.

Having played the game quite extensively on my 360, I opted towards a different approach to this game. I was going to make the best garden, nay the bestest garden the route 75 tram to Melbourne University had ever seen. After successfully growing a daisy, I looked around to see if I had impressed any of my fellow commuters . Heads down, it was hard to tell if their emotion was of repressed joy, or they were avoiding the eye contact of the strange man who gets on every day at Glenferrie station. I guessed joy. And the man sitting next to me, getting out of his seat and exiting the tram only confirmed my assumption. Not because it was his stop, rather he could not contain the overwhelming excitement he felt as my shovel was upgraded from metal, to aluminium.

Original conpcet of how my garden was to look

After successfully designing garden paths the likes of which would make Jamie Jury cry, more and more piñatas started to tumble their way into my Hate Factory. Side note; I called my garden Hate Factory. In order to attract a new piñata, you need to meet their requirements. Need it be a type of plant they eat, enough space for them to roam, or another animal they like to eat is already in your garden. With each piñata you attract, a new house is added to your building inventory. The building inventory being a builder you can contract to build a nice little habitat for piñatas to live, sleep and well.. Have sex in to put it bluntly.

6 hours into the game and you have access to various plants, gardening items, food and you’ve built a garden so pretty, even the best, no, bestest piñatas have to live there. But not me. 6 hours in I still had the first three piñatas, and some daisies. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I had 14 worms, 2 snakes and one rabbit. I decided to kill everything and draw a giant smiley face on my garden with paving instead. If I could place the blame on anyone, it would be the snakes. In order for mine to make little snakes, they needed to eat one of my piñatas. But they wouldn’t. I tried killing my other ones and placing their deceased bodies near the snakes. No, they were animal activist, vegan snakes that sat there in my flower patch all day. So I threw the towel in.

Example of the cute Pinatas I was too lazy unable to get

Only being able to play this game for so long (the 6 hours including when I forgot to turn the DS off at one point) I still had a rough idea of well, the game. That 6 hours, and the 30 from playing it on my 360. It seems explaining what the game is, and what you do it almost pointless. As everyone either criticises the game for being too cutesy, or played it just to watch the house bounce up as down the piñatas mate. In fact everyone has an opinion about this game. Mine was actually against it, until I personally picked up the controller and jumped right in.

I usually opt for war, fighting and adventure games. But there's something about taking a shovel in your hands stylis and planting turnip seeds that just holds my attention.

I'd suggest not overlooking this game. It may have back lash against it for being cute. But what's that to deter you from playing? Even though I shamed the Australian Digital Gardening Community, I still throughly enjoyed chasing Seedo's, a odd man who walks into your garden and throws seeds around, with my shovel and hitting him relentlessly.

Overall I think I brought excitement, sadness, love and shame into the carriage of the old route 75 to Melbourne University.

Pros

It was portable.

Cons

the stylis seemed to form it’s on opinions on my decisions. If I clicked no to selling my Fox, it would say yes. If I wanted some bread, it would register as no. Despite this being annoying, it wasn’t enough to deter me from playing. In all honesty, I had no problems with this game besides my apparent failure at producing a thriving garden