Viva Piñata : Trouble In Paradise : A gardening game on the Xbox 360. The biggest new feature in this game is online play, and I shutter to think of the racism a game about piñatas inspires on the bigot breeding ground that is Xbox Live.
Story : Professor Pester hates happy things, and has begun a crusade against happy things by waging a very subdued war on pinatakind. Along the way, he destroys some kind of database of marginal importance and you’re asked to rebuild it. Well, you don’t have to, I mean it’s not like the world is at stake here. After the introductory cutscene detailing this diabolically pointless scheme, the game just cuts loose and lets the player mess up the sandbox as he or she sees fit.
A piñata’s goal in life is to die. These nihilistic objects are shaped like animals and brought to parties where, like a pagan sacrifice, children beat them so that their innards may explode and our children can feast on them like the savages they are.
When you’re younger, you tend to let the more absurd things slide, or at least if the absurd things were cool enough to have their own action figures. Pokemon games made the player capture and collect wild animals, and then trained them to fight other people’s animals, essentially a child’s version of cockfighting. GI Joes pitting a legion of Americans against international terrorists in a large scale war where nobody actually died. And now we have Viva Piñata, Microsoft’s attempt to create its own children’s sensation, complete with its own TV show and everything. But the absurdity of the concept might be a little much for most kids to swallow, especially since there isn’t the instant gratification of giant explosions and a villain vowing to get you next time, that most Saturday morning fare presents. That said I can probably sell plenty of people on this game just by its own bizarre concept.
Apparently, the world is filled with bright-coloured piñata animals. And apparently, these animals love to go to parties, get beaten to death and have their entrails feasted on. At least that’s what this Langstrom fellow told me, he seems to be in charge of this operation. So the goal of your farm is to listen to what animal is wanted for what party, find a way to convince this animal to stay at your garden, fatten them up so their “candiosity” meter is full, and then send them to the doom they’ve been yearning for. Depressing, yet funny at the same time.
If I call Viva Piñata a “gardening game” then it’s bound to turn off the people that should be playing it. The idea is that you have this space of land that you can edit to your heart’s content. Meeting certain requirements will cause wild piñatas to appear, and if you meet other static requirements (or you just flat out captured them from another land, a new feature in this game that gleefully reminded me of Pokemon’s poaching mentality), then they’ll stick around. The game is at least forgiving enough to slowly break you into the many, many gameplay mechanics within, going from planting seeds to just dropping the seed instead of planting it (it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out) so you’ll rarely feel overwhelmed when the game asks you to plant sweet yams to draw in some arctic creature thingy.
I guess the appeal of Viva Piñata is that it has a way of surprising you. Making all kinds of alterations will cause different Piñatas to appear. You could be adding a pond in an attempt to lure some frog creature your current mission objective is asking for, but at the same time, you’ll bring in some other wild creatures. That rabbit you were planning to bring to a party? He just lured in a fox, and this fox is going to kill your rabbit because that’s what foxes do. I can’t remember any kind of children’s game that dealt with death like this, but I can’t help but smile at how the game has its own bright, colourful, happy food chain! A sound effect of children cheering plays every time a piñata is busted open and passes on, almost celebratory of this grim event. Or perhaps this game is one big denouncement of vegetarianism.
Oh, and there’s reproduction to. If two of the same species meet the correct “romantic requirements”, usually involving food (which I guess the same could be true for real humans), then you can put two piñatas in a special house where they will FUCK and inspire the stork to send a child. Well, FUCKing in Viva Piñata is symbolized by some mini-game of trying to collect hearts on a board or something, but still. Between Spore and now this, bizarre animal sex is slowly becoming the next big thing in children’s games.
What I like about Viva Piñata is that you can play it at your own pace and still make progress. You don’t have to buy into Langstrom’s scam of sending piñatas overseas or fill in every single entry in that farce that is “the database” to enjoy the game. Most any landmark accomplishment, like stumbling across a new piñata or causing torrid piñata sex, will grant experience points. Your garden leveling up will have a variety of benefits, often opening up new things to buy, places to go, piñatas to slaughter and so forth. And just tinkering with things will cause new piñatas to appear and a grin on your face. The game has a way of just making time slip away, hours will go by as you find yourself casually tweaking away at your garden, all excited because that cat that’s been stalking the outside has finally stepped in and devoured your mice.
Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise isn’t addictive, but rather relaxing. It’s a good game to play if you have blood pressure problems. Now, there are a few odd complaints I can throw at it. More than anything else, I wish I didn’t have to worry about watering flowers. Yes, I know that this game is supposed to be about gardening and all, but eventually my little space is going to grow enough that keeping track of all the vegetation is going to be a problem. And I also wish that I didn’t need to endure a load time, every time I went to one of the store owners of the area so I can purchase the one seed I was looking for to bring in the one species of animal that’s been lurking outside.
I can’t imagine kids liking this game. Asking for a child to run a garden is either asking for too much or akin to asking to pay $50 for more chores. The lack of, well, action is also enough to make kids run back to the next big anime cartoon or attempt at reviving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But for the rest of the world, Viva Piñata is fun, relaxing, bizarre, humourous, and an unlikely time sink. If Katamary Damacy taught us anything, it’s that there’s appeal in a game that relishes in how little sense it makes, and Viva Piñata is gloriously perverse entertainment.
Pros : And if you don’t like something, you can beat it to death with a shovel.
Cons : Reincarnates the E-Card reader. Using that Xbox camera that nobody owns, you can scan these collectable Piñata cards for items and such. Quite frankly, this feature can burn in hell.
4 stars
Here’s some footage of the TV show that co-launched with the original Viva Piñata. That the original game launched with a TV show in a blatant attempt to create the next big thing is my excuse for not playing the first game.
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