nesgamingcom
11-12-2006, 10:12 AM
im not too excited for this gamd and do not think ill get it but it got a decent review.
Viva Piñata Review
Just for kids or just plain fun?
by Erik Brudvig
November 10, 2006 - Viva Piñata has an undeniable charm to it. The game is squarely aimed at a younger demographic with cuddly piñatas that inhabit the land and cartoonish character-style and voices. Yet, the game design hits at something that can't be outgrown: the joy of discovery. That is, perhaps, the best way to describe Rare's new gem.
Viva Piñata also culls from so many different ideas that it is hard to succinctly explain what the point of the game is. The English developer's elaborately woven and complex endeavor brings great depth to the normally pallid kid genre, and that's part of what makes Viva Piñata such a great game. Despite ample room for improvement, this is easily one of the best titles, if not the best, Rare game since Microsoft bought it in 2002.
Part The Sims, part Animal Crossing and part resource management strategy, Viva Piñata stands alone as a deep and engaging title on Xbox 360, fully accessible to people of all ages. To describe the game, we'll start from the beginning. The game kicks off by providing you with a junk-riddled patch of packed soil and tasks you with shaping the land using a shovel. The point? To attract living piñatas, each with chuckle-inducing names that are all candy and sweet-themed takes on their animal likeness, in hopes of convincing them to take up residency. Like real-life animals, these piñatas have preferences for what their environments, neighbors and food should be. If you meet the first set of requirements, perhaps by planting enough grass, you'll see the piñata walking around just outside the boundaries of your garden. Make your land a little more attractive and they'll stop by for a visit. If they find what they were looking for, which could be anything from eating another piñata to finding a certain type of flower, then they'll take up residence.
Bare beginnings.
Once a piñata takes up residency, it changes from a black and white to the pastel blasted look that everyone associates with the party toys. When it does, you'll find that each one has a unique personality. Certain piñatas just don't get along with each other and will start fighting when they bump into each other. Others are friendlier and it isn't uncommon to see one piñata playfully chasing another around the garden in a squeak-filled game. Their personalities are strong enough that we often found ourselves attached to certain piñatas and unwilling to budge when it came to decisions involving their ultimate fate.
Convincing piñatas to take up residency isn't the only interaction you can have with them. Each piñata can be named, convinced to do the romance dance with another of its kind by meeting certain conditions to breed more piñatas, or dressed up with a wide variety of accessories. Or you can sell them for a profit or just beat them to death with your shovel. Since there isn't really an end goal for Viva Piñata, what you do with your garden and its inhabitants is completely up to you. This freedom makes it a guarantee that no two people will have the same garden as so much of the game is dependent on small actions, choices and random events. It also guarantees that you'll have a unique experience every time you turn on the game. Although the world is vibrant and alive, it stays that way when you turn the system off so that you don't come back to chaos.
There's a ton to do in Viva Piñata; so much that trying to describe everything here would make this review far too lengthy for its own good. Suffice it to say, the game is constantly filled with moments where you find something new to do and it keeps you fully occupied all of the time; there aren't really many moments where you don't know what to do next. The game encourages discovery as well through the leveling system. For every new action or goal you meet, you'll be rewarded with experience points. As you level up, new things are introduced to add variety and flair to your garden and piñatas, ensuring that you'll constantly find new things to see and do. Some piñatas only make an appearance when you've gained enough experience. Other things, such as objects to place in your garden, purchasable barnyard piñatas, and accessories have a list that expands in scope as you progress through levels.
Gardening can get expensive.
This discovery is made even more fun thanks to the nice graphics and the style with which the piñatas have been infused. Although the area that you can explore is limited to your garden, you'll find that everything is animated and full of life. Trees and flowers grow before your eyes as various piñatas use them as hiding places and the piñatas themselves all run around and behave comically. Just watching the Barkbark run around with his tongue hanging out is enough to crack us up. Say what you will about the classic Rare bubble-eyed cuddly design, but it works in a game like Viva Pinata. Unfortunately, the engine chugs everytime the game autosaves, which occurs frequently. It only lasts a moment, but it happens often enough to jolt you out of the experience.
The style doesn't stop with the visuals, though. The little vocalizations of the piñatas turn into some great ambient sounds on a 5.1 surround sound system. As you make your way around the garden, you'll hear little noises coming from each speaker that do a great job of engrossing you in the garden and bringing everything to life. The voices from the children's cartoon of the same name have been dropped from the game and been replaced with more appropriate animal sounds. They're cute but not overly exaggerated and they do a good job of filling in the aural duties in a game that lacks a large amount of music.
But not everything is fun and games in your garden. There are some nasty critters and creatures (called Sours) that pop in every now and then to cause havoc, make your piñatas ill, or even outright kill them. The appearance of these guys is also linked to your level, so novice players or children that are moving along at a slow pace won't find themselves overwhelmed trying to manage their space and keep everything from falling to bits. The introduction of more complicated gameplay as you progress to higher levels keeps things fresh and interesting for more talented players. It even gets to a point where there is a fair amount of difficulty in managing everything and making the tough decisions on which piñatas you should keep and which you should sacrifice in the interest of keeping things under control.
The resource management and sour piñata aspects bring up some of the more disturbing elements present in Viva Piñata. If a piñata gets smashed, candy naturally pops out. Sounds normal. It gets creepy when all of the other piñatas rush over to eat the remains. That's not even getting into the moments when piñatas each other alive. There are also a whole host of ethical issues that pop up when you start playing. If you're short on cash, is it ok to just begin breeding piñatas to sell for a profit? Should you smack Seedos in the face with a shovel in hopes of getting a few extra seeds to plant? It's all made even more disturbing by the fact that you're doing this to cute and cuddly critters. But sometimes "disturbing" gameplay makes for a good time in videogames. This is one of those cases.
Viva Piñata is definitely a fun game, though it does have some clear faults. The biggest disappointment comes with the limited amount of things you can do through Xbox Live. Granted, this game is intended for a younger audience and certain safeguards need to be put in. Yet the number of things you can do through Xbox Live is extremely limited. Leaderboards are in the game, though they're tucked away several layers deep in the journal. You can compare any of your own piñatas with your friends' piñatas to see who has the most valuable piñata of that type. You can also check to see who has the highest garden and piñata value of all time. It's good for simple comparisons.
We named the Barkbark Steve.
The other Live feature is the option to send and receive crates filled with things from the garden to anybody on your friend list. You can send up to five of the same object in a single crate along with a note, but you can't mix and match piñatas or other garden objects. The recipient won't have any knowledge as to what is in the crate. They'll have to open it to find out what's inside. If you receive a piñata you haven't tamed yet, it will automatically become a resident and award you experience as if you had met all of the requirements yourself. However, if it is a sour, it will revert back to its evil state and start causing chaos. Hopefully you don't have any evil friends, but you can always return the package to the sender or forward it on to somebody else if you haven't opened it yet.
Those two Xbox Live features are nice, but it seems like a serious oversight to not include the ability to show off your garden in some way to your friends. Here is a game where you spend all of your time cultivating and shaping your garden space -- and you can't show it to anybody on Live. The only way for them to see it is to be right next to you. Visiting other gardens, even if you can't interact with them, would have been great. Offering gifts after seeing what your friend has would make the crate system better. Even just being able to take snapshot pictures of your garden and attaching them to crates would have instilled more of a sense of pride in your garden than there currently is.
Candy innards make for a yummy treat.
The same things that make the game fun for an adult might also be a detriment for the younger audience. Surprisingly for a kids game, there is only a limited support that is spoon fed to you at the beginning of the game. Advice on hiring helpers, planting seeds and shaping your land is given, though there is a lot to do in the game that must be found on your own or can only be found by exploring your journal. The journal tracks your progress and lays out the conditions for all of the piñatas you've encountered. It works as a nice support mechanism, though filtering through it to find the information you want might be a little heady for a small child. Also, the resource management that needs to be done as you move through the game is tough, even for an experienced gamer. Forget about asking a small child to do everything that happens late in the game, if they can even get there. Since many of the coolest piñatas (see the Cinnamonkey and Horstachio) only show up later in the game, novice players might end up missing out on some of the fun.
There are a few things that make Viva Piñata more manageable; a handful of Helpers, for instance, who you can hire to do some of the management tasks. These guys are creepy looking, but they'll do some tasks you might not want to bother with such as watering your garden or warding off sour piñatas. Even with them, though, you'll find yourself running off on this or that tangent trying to figure out what you should focus on next.
The controls also have been fit to work with a child in mind. You can use the advanced controls that work similar to a first-person shooter. Or you can change it to a static camera and just use a single stick to explore the garden. Navigating through the menus is simple enough, though we did find some of the actions felt like they were child-proofed a little too much. Selling off an item, for example, takes four button presses. Annoying.
Oh and we almost forgot about the story. How could we do that? Probably because it seems as if it was an afterthought. The story comes in journal updates that you get access to at certain levels of experience, but it doesn't have much depth to it and is presented just as text with a voice reading to you. A story doesn't really fit into the open gameplay and was probably only included for the kids.
Closing Comments
If you've played The Sims or Animal Crossing and enjoyed them, Viva Pinata is a safe bet. The gameplay is more interactive and hectic, and facing the consequences of your actions, be they good or bad, is enjoyable gaming. Viva Piñata may have been designed with children in mind, but Rare has created a game that anybody with an open mind can get into and have fun with. The characters are endearing and the abounding sense of discovery can't be denied. Despite the slim interpersonal Xbox Live interaction we would hope for in a game like this, Viva Piñata has enough to explore and keep you busy that it makes for a solid purchase.
Another Takefrom Douglass C. Perry
For many years now, Microsoft and Rare have wanted to create game for all ages, including games for kids. Viva Pinata is definitely a kids’ game. That may put you off. But as opposed to the dozens of crappy kids games churned out by other publishers each year, Microsoft and Rare have made an engaging and surprisingly refreshing title. It's deep in the way that old Nintendo kids games used be, like The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, even Pokemon.
Viva Pinata isn't a platformer or an RPG though. It's really a very conscious blend of The Sims, Animal Crossing and Pokemon. I like to call it a garden sim, or jokingly, a shovel simulator. But it's more than that. And the only way to really convey the gameplay of Rare's new gem is to play it. It never plays the same way twice, and it's filled with surprising AI behavior, so if you and a friend each started games simultaneously, you'd have completely different gardens within a few hours. The gameplay is deep with choices, it's very well explained (though there is an overabundance of text for a kid), and it's never slow. Your garden will start off quickly: Animals show up and move in, they eat, breed and fight. Weirdly masked helpers appear to give guidance, and their help, their shops and their presence adds greatly to the experience. The online aspect, sharing and trading animals (like sending Sours to your buddy) should play out very well in theory; unfortunately, I was unable to try it, so I don't know firsthand.
In the long run, I'm inclined to think that I'll like Viva Pinata better than either Kameo or Perfect Dark Zero. It’s certainly different enough.
IGN Ratings for Viva Pinata (X360)
Rating Description
out of 10 click here for ratings guide
8.0 Presentation
Great style. Viva is rife with humor that will appeal to all ages.
8.0 Graphics
Frequent slowdown as the game autosaves hurts the nice visuals.
9.0 Sound
Excellent sound effects that help bring the world to life.
8.5 Gameplay
A unique game that is a surprisingly deep and engaging experience.
7.5 Lasting Appeal
More online features would have greatly extended the life of the game.
8.5
Great OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)
Viva Piñata Review
Just for kids or just plain fun?
by Erik Brudvig
November 10, 2006 - Viva Piñata has an undeniable charm to it. The game is squarely aimed at a younger demographic with cuddly piñatas that inhabit the land and cartoonish character-style and voices. Yet, the game design hits at something that can't be outgrown: the joy of discovery. That is, perhaps, the best way to describe Rare's new gem.
Viva Piñata also culls from so many different ideas that it is hard to succinctly explain what the point of the game is. The English developer's elaborately woven and complex endeavor brings great depth to the normally pallid kid genre, and that's part of what makes Viva Piñata such a great game. Despite ample room for improvement, this is easily one of the best titles, if not the best, Rare game since Microsoft bought it in 2002.
Part The Sims, part Animal Crossing and part resource management strategy, Viva Piñata stands alone as a deep and engaging title on Xbox 360, fully accessible to people of all ages. To describe the game, we'll start from the beginning. The game kicks off by providing you with a junk-riddled patch of packed soil and tasks you with shaping the land using a shovel. The point? To attract living piñatas, each with chuckle-inducing names that are all candy and sweet-themed takes on their animal likeness, in hopes of convincing them to take up residency. Like real-life animals, these piñatas have preferences for what their environments, neighbors and food should be. If you meet the first set of requirements, perhaps by planting enough grass, you'll see the piñata walking around just outside the boundaries of your garden. Make your land a little more attractive and they'll stop by for a visit. If they find what they were looking for, which could be anything from eating another piñata to finding a certain type of flower, then they'll take up residence.
Bare beginnings.
Once a piñata takes up residency, it changes from a black and white to the pastel blasted look that everyone associates with the party toys. When it does, you'll find that each one has a unique personality. Certain piñatas just don't get along with each other and will start fighting when they bump into each other. Others are friendlier and it isn't uncommon to see one piñata playfully chasing another around the garden in a squeak-filled game. Their personalities are strong enough that we often found ourselves attached to certain piñatas and unwilling to budge when it came to decisions involving their ultimate fate.
Convincing piñatas to take up residency isn't the only interaction you can have with them. Each piñata can be named, convinced to do the romance dance with another of its kind by meeting certain conditions to breed more piñatas, or dressed up with a wide variety of accessories. Or you can sell them for a profit or just beat them to death with your shovel. Since there isn't really an end goal for Viva Piñata, what you do with your garden and its inhabitants is completely up to you. This freedom makes it a guarantee that no two people will have the same garden as so much of the game is dependent on small actions, choices and random events. It also guarantees that you'll have a unique experience every time you turn on the game. Although the world is vibrant and alive, it stays that way when you turn the system off so that you don't come back to chaos.
There's a ton to do in Viva Piñata; so much that trying to describe everything here would make this review far too lengthy for its own good. Suffice it to say, the game is constantly filled with moments where you find something new to do and it keeps you fully occupied all of the time; there aren't really many moments where you don't know what to do next. The game encourages discovery as well through the leveling system. For every new action or goal you meet, you'll be rewarded with experience points. As you level up, new things are introduced to add variety and flair to your garden and piñatas, ensuring that you'll constantly find new things to see and do. Some piñatas only make an appearance when you've gained enough experience. Other things, such as objects to place in your garden, purchasable barnyard piñatas, and accessories have a list that expands in scope as you progress through levels.
Gardening can get expensive.
This discovery is made even more fun thanks to the nice graphics and the style with which the piñatas have been infused. Although the area that you can explore is limited to your garden, you'll find that everything is animated and full of life. Trees and flowers grow before your eyes as various piñatas use them as hiding places and the piñatas themselves all run around and behave comically. Just watching the Barkbark run around with his tongue hanging out is enough to crack us up. Say what you will about the classic Rare bubble-eyed cuddly design, but it works in a game like Viva Pinata. Unfortunately, the engine chugs everytime the game autosaves, which occurs frequently. It only lasts a moment, but it happens often enough to jolt you out of the experience.
The style doesn't stop with the visuals, though. The little vocalizations of the piñatas turn into some great ambient sounds on a 5.1 surround sound system. As you make your way around the garden, you'll hear little noises coming from each speaker that do a great job of engrossing you in the garden and bringing everything to life. The voices from the children's cartoon of the same name have been dropped from the game and been replaced with more appropriate animal sounds. They're cute but not overly exaggerated and they do a good job of filling in the aural duties in a game that lacks a large amount of music.
But not everything is fun and games in your garden. There are some nasty critters and creatures (called Sours) that pop in every now and then to cause havoc, make your piñatas ill, or even outright kill them. The appearance of these guys is also linked to your level, so novice players or children that are moving along at a slow pace won't find themselves overwhelmed trying to manage their space and keep everything from falling to bits. The introduction of more complicated gameplay as you progress to higher levels keeps things fresh and interesting for more talented players. It even gets to a point where there is a fair amount of difficulty in managing everything and making the tough decisions on which piñatas you should keep and which you should sacrifice in the interest of keeping things under control.
The resource management and sour piñata aspects bring up some of the more disturbing elements present in Viva Piñata. If a piñata gets smashed, candy naturally pops out. Sounds normal. It gets creepy when all of the other piñatas rush over to eat the remains. That's not even getting into the moments when piñatas each other alive. There are also a whole host of ethical issues that pop up when you start playing. If you're short on cash, is it ok to just begin breeding piñatas to sell for a profit? Should you smack Seedos in the face with a shovel in hopes of getting a few extra seeds to plant? It's all made even more disturbing by the fact that you're doing this to cute and cuddly critters. But sometimes "disturbing" gameplay makes for a good time in videogames. This is one of those cases.
Viva Piñata is definitely a fun game, though it does have some clear faults. The biggest disappointment comes with the limited amount of things you can do through Xbox Live. Granted, this game is intended for a younger audience and certain safeguards need to be put in. Yet the number of things you can do through Xbox Live is extremely limited. Leaderboards are in the game, though they're tucked away several layers deep in the journal. You can compare any of your own piñatas with your friends' piñatas to see who has the most valuable piñata of that type. You can also check to see who has the highest garden and piñata value of all time. It's good for simple comparisons.
We named the Barkbark Steve.
The other Live feature is the option to send and receive crates filled with things from the garden to anybody on your friend list. You can send up to five of the same object in a single crate along with a note, but you can't mix and match piñatas or other garden objects. The recipient won't have any knowledge as to what is in the crate. They'll have to open it to find out what's inside. If you receive a piñata you haven't tamed yet, it will automatically become a resident and award you experience as if you had met all of the requirements yourself. However, if it is a sour, it will revert back to its evil state and start causing chaos. Hopefully you don't have any evil friends, but you can always return the package to the sender or forward it on to somebody else if you haven't opened it yet.
Those two Xbox Live features are nice, but it seems like a serious oversight to not include the ability to show off your garden in some way to your friends. Here is a game where you spend all of your time cultivating and shaping your garden space -- and you can't show it to anybody on Live. The only way for them to see it is to be right next to you. Visiting other gardens, even if you can't interact with them, would have been great. Offering gifts after seeing what your friend has would make the crate system better. Even just being able to take snapshot pictures of your garden and attaching them to crates would have instilled more of a sense of pride in your garden than there currently is.
Candy innards make for a yummy treat.
The same things that make the game fun for an adult might also be a detriment for the younger audience. Surprisingly for a kids game, there is only a limited support that is spoon fed to you at the beginning of the game. Advice on hiring helpers, planting seeds and shaping your land is given, though there is a lot to do in the game that must be found on your own or can only be found by exploring your journal. The journal tracks your progress and lays out the conditions for all of the piñatas you've encountered. It works as a nice support mechanism, though filtering through it to find the information you want might be a little heady for a small child. Also, the resource management that needs to be done as you move through the game is tough, even for an experienced gamer. Forget about asking a small child to do everything that happens late in the game, if they can even get there. Since many of the coolest piñatas (see the Cinnamonkey and Horstachio) only show up later in the game, novice players might end up missing out on some of the fun.
There are a few things that make Viva Piñata more manageable; a handful of Helpers, for instance, who you can hire to do some of the management tasks. These guys are creepy looking, but they'll do some tasks you might not want to bother with such as watering your garden or warding off sour piñatas. Even with them, though, you'll find yourself running off on this or that tangent trying to figure out what you should focus on next.
The controls also have been fit to work with a child in mind. You can use the advanced controls that work similar to a first-person shooter. Or you can change it to a static camera and just use a single stick to explore the garden. Navigating through the menus is simple enough, though we did find some of the actions felt like they were child-proofed a little too much. Selling off an item, for example, takes four button presses. Annoying.
Oh and we almost forgot about the story. How could we do that? Probably because it seems as if it was an afterthought. The story comes in journal updates that you get access to at certain levels of experience, but it doesn't have much depth to it and is presented just as text with a voice reading to you. A story doesn't really fit into the open gameplay and was probably only included for the kids.
Closing Comments
If you've played The Sims or Animal Crossing and enjoyed them, Viva Pinata is a safe bet. The gameplay is more interactive and hectic, and facing the consequences of your actions, be they good or bad, is enjoyable gaming. Viva Piñata may have been designed with children in mind, but Rare has created a game that anybody with an open mind can get into and have fun with. The characters are endearing and the abounding sense of discovery can't be denied. Despite the slim interpersonal Xbox Live interaction we would hope for in a game like this, Viva Piñata has enough to explore and keep you busy that it makes for a solid purchase.
Another Takefrom Douglass C. Perry
For many years now, Microsoft and Rare have wanted to create game for all ages, including games for kids. Viva Pinata is definitely a kids’ game. That may put you off. But as opposed to the dozens of crappy kids games churned out by other publishers each year, Microsoft and Rare have made an engaging and surprisingly refreshing title. It's deep in the way that old Nintendo kids games used be, like The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, even Pokemon.
Viva Pinata isn't a platformer or an RPG though. It's really a very conscious blend of The Sims, Animal Crossing and Pokemon. I like to call it a garden sim, or jokingly, a shovel simulator. But it's more than that. And the only way to really convey the gameplay of Rare's new gem is to play it. It never plays the same way twice, and it's filled with surprising AI behavior, so if you and a friend each started games simultaneously, you'd have completely different gardens within a few hours. The gameplay is deep with choices, it's very well explained (though there is an overabundance of text for a kid), and it's never slow. Your garden will start off quickly: Animals show up and move in, they eat, breed and fight. Weirdly masked helpers appear to give guidance, and their help, their shops and their presence adds greatly to the experience. The online aspect, sharing and trading animals (like sending Sours to your buddy) should play out very well in theory; unfortunately, I was unable to try it, so I don't know firsthand.
In the long run, I'm inclined to think that I'll like Viva Pinata better than either Kameo or Perfect Dark Zero. It’s certainly different enough.
IGN Ratings for Viva Pinata (X360)
Rating Description
out of 10 click here for ratings guide
8.0 Presentation
Great style. Viva is rife with humor that will appeal to all ages.
8.0 Graphics
Frequent slowdown as the game autosaves hurts the nice visuals.
9.0 Sound
Excellent sound effects that help bring the world to life.
8.5 Gameplay
A unique game that is a surprisingly deep and engaging experience.
7.5 Lasting Appeal
More online features would have greatly extended the life of the game.
8.5
Great OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)