Sassafrass Reviews: Viva Pinata
Legal stuff before I begin
Any TL;DR post will result in a report.
Thanks to Google for providing the images.
I make no promises this won?t be a fan boyish review. I will try to keep the fanboy in check, though.
Viva Pinata, developed by Rare and released in November 2006[footnote]Holy hell, that?s a long time ago.[/footnote] for the X-Box 360 is, well, a very hard game to label. It is a life simulation game in one aspect, but it is also a Gardening Sim as well. Therefore, the best way to describe this game is probably a Gardening Simulation with some life simulation aspects in. Or vice versa.
Normally, I like to begin my reviews with an over-view of the story. Of course, this review will be no exception. So, here we go then. There is not really a story to Viva Pinata. There is no real ?goal? to the game, no real plot except for the plot of land you must turn into a paradise for Pinatas but more on that later on when it?s relevant, the only real indication of what you have to do is told to you very bluntly. At the beginning of the game, you are given a brief history of the game. Basically, there once lived a very famous gardener who made a garden that could attract all type of Pinatas. However, this gardener vanished, his garden fell into ruins and Pinatas left the garden and the surrounding area. Now, you, the player, are tasked with the job of restoring a wasteland back into something beautiful, amazing and something that looks like the creator has OD?d on LSD and helping restore the lost glory of the once glorious Pinata Island.
The fact Viva Pinata does not have a story as such works in towards making this game what it is, a complete bundle of fun and free form. Having no set goal or actually anything to aim for is refreshing and is part of what makes this game appealing. All too many games force you to do something in a certain way, due to the story of said game. Because of a lack of a story and because there is nothing telling the player to do a certain task or to get to a certain place, you can play this game very much your own way, letting you basically make your own garden in whatever way you see fit and set your own goals and targets to aim at. You could have only a handful of Pinata species in it, you could have as many as you want and you could even have only one type of Pinata species. The amount of different ways to play the game is endless, which leads to a more open-ended game world and a different kind of play style through out the game, making each time you play Viva Pinata a fun experience.
It?s exactly what it looks like.
With the story, or indeed the lack of a story thereof, Viva Pinata does rely on its game-play mechanics a lot more then other games do. And if Viva Pinata is unplayable, it has nothing going for it. Thankfully, the play-ability holds up well, even today. The controls are simple and easy to use but it is not here the game-play excels, it?s in Viva Pinata?s eco-system. You can plant seeds to grow trees, plants and fruit and these must be watered and kept safe if you want your garden to look nice and all of this can be done by using the D-Pad to select your spade, watering can or grass seeds, which are automatically hot-keyed for you. The plants are also sometimes used to attract certain types of Pinata, which I will explain more about. To attract Pinatas, you must first fulfil some set requirements, have x% of your garden covered in long grass, having their garden covered with x% of ponds or having a certain type of plant or other Pinata. Now, it?s only a visitor, you must fulfil a new list of requirements to make it yours to keep. Upon doing so, it shall gain its colours and stop being black and white, and become a part of your pinata family.
So, now you have your Pinata, soon you will acquire it a mate and you want to get another one of those Pinata?s quickly, without fulfilling the old requirements. Well, put on the romantic music, turn the lights off and light some candles, as Viva Pinata has some sexy times. Met the required ?Romance Requirements?, the two Pinatas will head off into their house and you?ll be treated to a mini-game, where you must navigate a Pinata through a maze to its mate. Upon completion, you get treated to a mini-cutscene which shows you the Pinatas doing a ?Romance Dance?. Thankfully, if you do romance two Pinatas again, the maze will be a little bit tougher, so you have a bit more of a challenge every time you do it. It?s a nice little touch that adds replayability. After that, you await the arrival of Storkos, a sort of flying person slash stork hybrid thing, who delivers the egg and then you wait for it to hatch, upon doing so, you receive a new baby Pinata which doesn?t take long to grow into an adult Pinata.
So sweet but yet, deadlier then Swine Flu, which hit my garden and killed 4 Whirlms. Or that may have been my shovel.
This is basically all that happens in Viva Pinata. Meeting requirements, although it works very well for the most part by always giving you something to do, soon gets a bit tedious and repetitive, especially in the latter stages. If you sink in enough hours into the game and you get about 2 new Pinatas in 10 hours of play time, you will be left wondering why you are doing this. Grinding out requirement after requirement soon becomes akin to grinding for 50 hours in an RPG, dull, boring and about as much fun as being given wedgies by ?The Expendables? cast. While there is a little bit more to the game-play, keeping the Sour Pinatas, evil versions which can be tamed, Ruffians and their nasty leader Dastardos, from trashing and destroying your garden, the attacks by them never really happen enough for my liking. Add to that you can actually buy items from the in-game shop to stop these attacks happening out-right, any challenge outside of the requirements is gone if you do so. It does feel like Rare have hidden the training wheels nearby and are prepared to whip them out for you at any stage, in case you wobble slightly. There is very little to do to your pinatas when you?ve got them as well, except for the exception of being able to ?evolve? certain pinatas into an advanced species. While there are a few, there are no hints as to what species can evolve, leaving you to spend a long time just making a Sparrowmint eat various plants, hoping it?ll turn into a Candary which will eventually grate if you make no progress after about 5 hours.
All that said, I always find myself getting drawn back in for a couple of hours, to tweak away at those requirements, plant pretty flowers and grow trees that grow gems on them. This may be in part due to my massive fan-boyism of the game, which I?ve put aside for this review, it also may be due to the graphics, which on a console dominated by dull greys and browns, the bright greens, blues and reds of Viva Pinata certainly do make a big difference. However, it is actually down to the humour of the game I keep going back to it. For a kiddies game, it certainly does have a lot of dark humour within it. When a Pinata is killed, you hear children cheer, there are a lot of sex references hidden through out the game and, indeed, the mating mini-game is questionable, as are the dances afterwards and the game itself hints at incest as you can have any Pinata of the same species mate. It also references Rare?s other games, with Banjo Kazooie appearing as a statue and the Rare title ?Grabbed by The Ghoulies? is brought up a couple of times in game. It?s packed full of references to older Rare games, the times many consider to be the golden times before Rare?s fall from grace.
Yes, that is a bear behind the horse. Yes, it is about to eat him.
So, after all that, would I recommend you to look up Viva Pinata? Yes, I would. While it does have its flaws and little to no story at all, it is a very enjoyable game that will put a smile on your face. While it might get repetitive after a while, those hours spent nurturing plants, raising pinatas and trying and failing to find out how to evolve them while be the happiest hours you can have without being screamed at by somebody over a head-set. Unless you?re in a party chat with a few people playing MW2. Then you might get shouted at.
You %?$£.
[small]Aright, time for the fan-boygasm. *Ahem* This game is simply the best game ever made and if you disagree with that, kindly go get eaten by a Horstachio then murdered by small children. That is all.[/small]
Legal stuff before I begin
Any TL;DR post will result in a report.
Thanks to Google for providing the images.
I make no promises this won?t be a fan boyish review. I will try to keep the fanboy in check, though.
Viva Pinata, developed by Rare and released in November 2006[footnote]Holy hell, that?s a long time ago.[/footnote] for the X-Box 360 is, well, a very hard game to label. It is a life simulation game in one aspect, but it is also a Gardening Sim as well. Therefore, the best way to describe this game is probably a Gardening Simulation with some life simulation aspects in. Or vice versa.
Normally, I like to begin my reviews with an over-view of the story. Of course, this review will be no exception. So, here we go then. There is not really a story to Viva Pinata. There is no real ?goal? to the game, no real plot except for the plot of land you must turn into a paradise for Pinatas but more on that later on when it?s relevant, the only real indication of what you have to do is told to you very bluntly. At the beginning of the game, you are given a brief history of the game. Basically, there once lived a very famous gardener who made a garden that could attract all type of Pinatas. However, this gardener vanished, his garden fell into ruins and Pinatas left the garden and the surrounding area. Now, you, the player, are tasked with the job of restoring a wasteland back into something beautiful, amazing and something that looks like the creator has OD?d on LSD and helping restore the lost glory of the once glorious Pinata Island.
The fact Viva Pinata does not have a story as such works in towards making this game what it is, a complete bundle of fun and free form. Having no set goal or actually anything to aim for is refreshing and is part of what makes this game appealing. All too many games force you to do something in a certain way, due to the story of said game. Because of a lack of a story and because there is nothing telling the player to do a certain task or to get to a certain place, you can play this game very much your own way, letting you basically make your own garden in whatever way you see fit and set your own goals and targets to aim at. You could have only a handful of Pinata species in it, you could have as many as you want and you could even have only one type of Pinata species. The amount of different ways to play the game is endless, which leads to a more open-ended game world and a different kind of play style through out the game, making each time you play Viva Pinata a fun experience.
It?s exactly what it looks like.
With the story, or indeed the lack of a story thereof, Viva Pinata does rely on its game-play mechanics a lot more then other games do. And if Viva Pinata is unplayable, it has nothing going for it. Thankfully, the play-ability holds up well, even today. The controls are simple and easy to use but it is not here the game-play excels, it?s in Viva Pinata?s eco-system. You can plant seeds to grow trees, plants and fruit and these must be watered and kept safe if you want your garden to look nice and all of this can be done by using the D-Pad to select your spade, watering can or grass seeds, which are automatically hot-keyed for you. The plants are also sometimes used to attract certain types of Pinata, which I will explain more about. To attract Pinatas, you must first fulfil some set requirements, have x% of your garden covered in long grass, having their garden covered with x% of ponds or having a certain type of plant or other Pinata. Now, it?s only a visitor, you must fulfil a new list of requirements to make it yours to keep. Upon doing so, it shall gain its colours and stop being black and white, and become a part of your pinata family.
So, now you have your Pinata, soon you will acquire it a mate and you want to get another one of those Pinata?s quickly, without fulfilling the old requirements. Well, put on the romantic music, turn the lights off and light some candles, as Viva Pinata has some sexy times. Met the required ?Romance Requirements?, the two Pinatas will head off into their house and you?ll be treated to a mini-game, where you must navigate a Pinata through a maze to its mate. Upon completion, you get treated to a mini-cutscene which shows you the Pinatas doing a ?Romance Dance?. Thankfully, if you do romance two Pinatas again, the maze will be a little bit tougher, so you have a bit more of a challenge every time you do it. It?s a nice little touch that adds replayability. After that, you await the arrival of Storkos, a sort of flying person slash stork hybrid thing, who delivers the egg and then you wait for it to hatch, upon doing so, you receive a new baby Pinata which doesn?t take long to grow into an adult Pinata.
So sweet but yet, deadlier then Swine Flu, which hit my garden and killed 4 Whirlms. Or that may have been my shovel.
This is basically all that happens in Viva Pinata. Meeting requirements, although it works very well for the most part by always giving you something to do, soon gets a bit tedious and repetitive, especially in the latter stages. If you sink in enough hours into the game and you get about 2 new Pinatas in 10 hours of play time, you will be left wondering why you are doing this. Grinding out requirement after requirement soon becomes akin to grinding for 50 hours in an RPG, dull, boring and about as much fun as being given wedgies by ?The Expendables? cast. While there is a little bit more to the game-play, keeping the Sour Pinatas, evil versions which can be tamed, Ruffians and their nasty leader Dastardos, from trashing and destroying your garden, the attacks by them never really happen enough for my liking. Add to that you can actually buy items from the in-game shop to stop these attacks happening out-right, any challenge outside of the requirements is gone if you do so. It does feel like Rare have hidden the training wheels nearby and are prepared to whip them out for you at any stage, in case you wobble slightly. There is very little to do to your pinatas when you?ve got them as well, except for the exception of being able to ?evolve? certain pinatas into an advanced species. While there are a few, there are no hints as to what species can evolve, leaving you to spend a long time just making a Sparrowmint eat various plants, hoping it?ll turn into a Candary which will eventually grate if you make no progress after about 5 hours.
All that said, I always find myself getting drawn back in for a couple of hours, to tweak away at those requirements, plant pretty flowers and grow trees that grow gems on them. This may be in part due to my massive fan-boyism of the game, which I?ve put aside for this review, it also may be due to the graphics, which on a console dominated by dull greys and browns, the bright greens, blues and reds of Viva Pinata certainly do make a big difference. However, it is actually down to the humour of the game I keep going back to it. For a kiddies game, it certainly does have a lot of dark humour within it. When a Pinata is killed, you hear children cheer, there are a lot of sex references hidden through out the game and, indeed, the mating mini-game is questionable, as are the dances afterwards and the game itself hints at incest as you can have any Pinata of the same species mate. It also references Rare?s other games, with Banjo Kazooie appearing as a statue and the Rare title ?Grabbed by The Ghoulies? is brought up a couple of times in game. It?s packed full of references to older Rare games, the times many consider to be the golden times before Rare?s fall from grace.
Yes, that is a bear behind the horse. Yes, it is about to eat him.
So, after all that, would I recommend you to look up Viva Pinata? Yes, I would. While it does have its flaws and little to no story at all, it is a very enjoyable game that will put a smile on your face. While it might get repetitive after a while, those hours spent nurturing plants, raising pinatas and trying and failing to find out how to evolve them while be the happiest hours you can have without being screamed at by somebody over a head-set. Unless you?re in a party chat with a few people playing MW2. Then you might get shouted at.
You %?$£.
[small]Aright, time for the fan-boygasm. *Ahem* This game is simply the best game ever made and if you disagree with that, kindly go get eaten by a Horstachio then murdered by small children. That is all.[/small]
