Beyond the horrible 4kids TV show lies an amazing pinata based garden sim...
In Viva Pinata you play as the poppin fresh new gardener on Pinata Island. An Island were pinata's need to be raised in gardens in order to be sent off to parties. The former owner of Pinata Island has grown too old and now it is your turn to take over the island and make it flourish.
Viva Pinata plays like a lot of games, it is hard to describe. Try mixing the sims with Animal Crossing and then make it less complex. In Viva Pinata you must bring the now desolate and ugly Pinata Island, back to it's former glory. In order to do that, you can create up to 8 gardens to collect all the pinatas necessary.
In order to do this, you must clean up the island using your trusty shovel, watering can and grass packet. After touching up your first garden, Pinatas start to come, but they will only be visiting. Each Pinata has their own set of likes or dislikes. Satisfy their likes and they may stay for good. For some it may be as easy as "have this much grass" or "Have this Pinata" but others may be as hard as "Eat 3 Beavers" or "Grow a crap load of corn". The harder Pinatas does add a nice difficulty to the game, even if it isn't much, however in the end it ends up just being more time consuming rather than hard. After you gather some Pinatas, you must romance them to get more of that kind and to sell them for money. More money means you can buy things at the store. You can buy a number of things, whether they are decorations, upgrades, helpers, etc. However a number of these things are very useless. For example you can higher a Weeder but most of the time, you only get weeds when you plant them. While none of this sounds very fun, you would be surprised at how fun it is.
Now collecting Pinatas and pimping out a garden may sound easy, but it is made slightly more difficult by Professor Pester and his crew. Prof. Pester's whole goal in life is to destroy your garden and kill your pinatas, that is unless you buy an item to scare them off. Thats right, for a small fee, you can scare away one of the games only obstacles. There are still more though. Certain pinatas get angry or dislike other pinatas and will get in fights, usually resulting in a bad illness for the loser. The only other issue is the games somewhat bad A.I. You can direct your Pinatas to certain places to get them to get or do certain things, however they just completely ignore you sometimes. Not only that but helpers and garden guests seems to get in the way more than they help.
While you can do a lot to your garden and to your pinatas it really feels like Rare could of done more. For one thing, each garden is not big enough to fit everything you would want in it, meaning you have to split up your things into 8 different gardens which fine but bigger gardens would be a plus. There isnt much you can do to your garden though other than planting plants, buying lawn ornaments and digging ponds, although these ponds are really just big puddles. Your garden is also completely flat, a hill builder or ditch builder would be gladly accepted along with an ocean builder.
On the Visual standfront, Viva Pinata looks great. Lots of beautiful colors and lots of bloom and Amazing art direction, this is definitely a Rare game. Some textures can look bad, but in the end, Rare pulls of another looker. Sometimes Pinatas walk through things like fences but otherwise really good. There is some major slowdown at times though, especially during the games mandatory auto save. Ignoring that there should not be much to complain about on the Visual and technical frontline.
Rare also delivers on the audio front as well, for the most part. Pinatas make noises that cannot even be described (it is a good thing), soothing and fitting music, and great item sound effects. However most of the non pinata characters have been dubbed over with horribly annoying voice acting that is just plain awful. Other than that, not much left to say.
At it's release, Viva Pinata was $60, a bit steep, but the addictiveness, the fun factor and the sheer quirkiness makes up for it. The game is now $20 and it is a steal at that price. If you are looking for a great virtual sim or just an overall amazing game on the 360 that isnt a shooter, Viva Pinata is for you! But if you are one who screams kiddy to anything that doesnt have a gray color scheme, go back to your Gears of War.