My primary controller is broken and I don't have cash to buy another. I've been out of the shooting rooms for about two weeks, and I've been playing Viva Pinata. That's the excuse I'll be giving the guys on Gears of War and Rainbow Six, but the fact is that this game is a lot of fun.
OK so the basic premise is this. Viva Pinata is a god game, which is to say that it is The Sims with animals. There is actually something stunningly compelling about the basic premise even in this Fisher-Price interface. You're basically allotted a scrubby patch of junkyard that you must convert into a garden. You start with a few basic seeds and a broken up shovel and a worm or two. Your job, turn this wreck into an environmental paradise.
Since the game is obviously for the younger set, you'd think that perhaps they've dumbed down nature. OK yes there is a stork involved, but the player is responsible for getting pairs of animals to do the 'romance dance', which is a mini-game within the sim for each species. I've been playing for about 18 virtual days and have managed to collect, very un-Noah-like about 20 different species of animals. You learn very quickly which animals eat which others or if plants are their thing. For some reason, the frogs and newts really go at it, and bees and ants hate each other with deadly passion. The snakes are remarkably tame. There are 'sour' animals too that simply prey on every species, there are poison plants and inexplicable sicknesses too. You find yourself after a few upgrades overseeing quite a menageries of plants, trees, insects, rodents, mammals, flowers and god knows what else is in store. Viva Pinata is a masterwork of farming and husbandry with ecological details that pull few punches.
Now it's true that animals that die explode into pieces of candy, after all they are pinatas. So it's lighthearted enough for any kid who can handle an XBox controller. But it can get as complex as you can manage. Still, the engineers seem to have found a way to moderate the pace. So it doesn't seem to game you as hard as you might expect of a game of this complexity. On the other hand, if you're going full hog as I am, you can find out nice farming economies, purchase helpers of various competencies and get real traffic minded in designing your plot of land.
Like with the Sims, you can build ponds or fill them back in. You place trees and plants, fences, birdhouses and the like. Creatures require certain environmental niceties. So if you want to get a mouse, you have to plant radishes.If you want rabbits, you have to plant... hmm what do you think? But that's just to get them to visit. If you want them to mate, you have to get them on a proper diet and provide the right house. For example, if you want a baby snake, you have to attract the snakes. Then you have to feed them each a frog and build a snakehouse. But to get the frog you have to have a certain amount of pond area, and the frogs have to have eaten some flies to stick around. Well to get flies, you have to have the right kind of flowers. You get the picture. There's a deer that skirts by every once in a while, I'm desparing because a sour bat just bit my sparrow.
What god game would be complete without some control over life and death? Since all pinata are candy on the inside, you can whack a fox upside the head with your shovel and feed the pieces to a frog.You can also play capitalist, find a cash crop and just hire a hunter to go track down a rabbit for you rather than spend the time crafting a seductive ecosphere. There's also a bum in the game. I have yet to figure out what purpose he serves, so I whacked him on the head with a shovel once too. It didn't matter, he keeps coming back begging for coins.
I'm somewhat embarrassed by how much I like the game. I mean it can be very insipid at times. All of the creatures have big baby doll eyes, and you can look at them doing things inside their homes, which inevitably elicit cries of "OOooh they are sooo cute!", from my ten year old daughter. Yeah when you think about it, these are like beanie babies come to life. So yes absolutely it will hold your kidnicks transfixed. It is rich gameplay with dozens of different species to play with and watch interact. There's even a feature that allows kid friends to share animals via XBox Live. If I were so inclined, I wouldn't mind one bit giving XBox Live to my daughters. VP is a perfect environment for kids, and it's way more expansive than the games that kids play on PCs like Millsberry and Club Penguin.
If Microsoft is smart about gaming, and I know they are, they will come up with a set of Viva Pinata class games. It will be the biggest hit since Pajama Sam and the Humongous Entertainment series. The kinds of controls that are in place for XBox Live for such games good, I know because I have such controls for Boy on his account, and when it comes down to it every parent who wants some control and direction over their kids online use would much rather have it done on a game console than on the family PC.
Now, sadly, I'm going to give the kids their controller back.
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