Cerise Magazine

Piñatas. The Mexican party-goer and now the tools for your creation. Viva Piñata gives you the means to make a garden and fill it with living piñatas to customize and care for. Don’t let the cartoon look to it turn you off from a great game. Viva Piñata is filled with colorful NPCs and items that can help you create the garden you’d never thought you’d be pumping 40+ hours into.

Piñatas and You

You play a floating cursor in this Sim City meets Animal Crossing game, trying to be the best of the best to gain better equipment and larger area of land in which to create your garden. Using your trusty upgradeable shovel and watering can, you can fill the landscape with ponds, trees and flowers. The plot is mediocre at best, but honestly, I didn’t expect the plot to be outstanding for a piñata sim farming game. You’re simply trying to be the best and keep your garden at its greatest.

The piñatas in the game are incredibly colorful and full of personality. There are dozens of ways to customize the way your piñatas look with zany hats, clothes and glasses. You can also change the color of your piñata by feeding it certain items. First, you attract the piñatas in your garden to become residents. Each has its own requirement, which could be anything from a certain fruit growing to a number of animals the piñata eats. It is incredibly difficult to please some of the fickle piñatas, as they will sometimes ignore everything you’ve set up to attract them there in the first place. Alternatively, the opposite can happen. Piñatas that you didn’t want in the first place come in and snack on one of your beloved residents. You can fence in some of your animals, but NPCs that wander throughout your garden may get stuck in your gate system and inevitably let your favorite piñatas out to be food. Bummer.

Once you have your piñatas, you can get them to bond and make you mad stacks of the game’s currency: chocolate gold coins. The goal with your piñatas is to romance up those little paper mache buddies either to create babies for money or to earn achievements/awards in the game to gain experience. The piñatas don’t have gender, so you can breed whichever ones you want together. How you do this depends on the piñata. Some piñatas require certain food items or to eat a different piñata or even at some point wear a specific item to get in the mood. A pink heart appears above the animal’s head and they’re ready for the romancing mini game! The little game includes you guiding one animal to the other animal so they can do some vertical mambo or a number of other adorable dances in their little house. One they meet together, an NPC will drop off an egg. The egg will eventually hatch and a wee piñata is born. Quickly, the baby piñata will cocoon itself and eventually emerge as an adult so you can start incestuously mating it with its parents.

Problems with Piñatas

But all is not well in your garden. Your piñatas can become sick from sour piñatas coming into your garden and vomiting up bad candy. Sour piñatas are piñatas gone bad, and they will continue to plague your garden until you make them happy residents. Along with the sour piñatas come assortments of baddies (otherwise known as ruffians) that will also vomit up bad candy that will make your piñatas sick - or worse. The scallywags may come in and break some of your expensive items or even pop a few favored piñatas.

Are those ruffians keeping you down? Can’t keep your flowers growing and your piñatas happy at the same time? You can hire some less-than-helpful helping hands. Viva Piñata offers four different kinds of helper, two that actually are help. The brigade of help includes: Watchlings that fail to keep the baddies out of the garden, Gatherlings that need to be pointed to the items that need to be gathered, thus defeating their purpose, Weedlings that hardly give you their money’s worth unless your garden gets overrun with weeds, Sprinklings which usually water all of the gardens thirsty plants, and finally Diggerlings which waddle off into the mine in search of items and gems for the garden.

One of the game’s bigger problems is gating some of the animals off. You set up elaborate fences to keep in animals that seem to be number one on the paper animal food chain, only to find they have phased their way through the fence anyway. Different fences hold different animals at bay, but it seems that no matter what fence is used, the animals get out by some glitch or by the helpers leaving gates open. Trying to fence piñatas in may be a lost cause.

Piñata Perks

Visually, Viva Piñata is a gorgeous game. The environment looks slick and vivid. The piñatas themselves are detailed with ‘fur’ that shifts with the wind and eyes that dart around. It’s always exciting to see what piñata will become available or what colors it becomes once it takes up residence in your garden. In addition, there are several rare Easter eggs. Banjo-Kazooie, Conker and Grabbed by the Ghoulies are some to look for in shops, piñata homes and items.

The sounds effects of the game might get annoying, but that really goes for any Sim game. The Sims 2 had its Simlish and Animal Crossing had its animalese; Viva Piñata is no different in that sense. Each piñata has its fitting noise like any other animal and all of the NPC characters have a charming British-esque accent. If you can’t take the noise, turn the volume down. The music of Viva Piñata molds perfectly with the setting, light and lively in the morning and serene and calm in the night.

Viva Pinata: The Quick Blurb

Give this somewhat kiddish-looking game a chance. Viva Piñata is an adorable, addicting and surprisingly advanced game in the guise of children’s game. In what other game can you pop piñatas that will whimper in pain before the last killing blow?

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Viva Piñata

June 2007 Issue

Features

Interviews

Articles

Gamer Stories

Reviews

Piñatas and You

Problems with Piñatas

Piñata Perks

Viva Pinata: The Quick Blurb