Viva Piñata Hands-On
We spend some quality time with a near-finished version of Rare's upcoming life simulation, earning the title of expert gardener in the process.
We've been fortunate enough to check out Viva Piñata for brief periods of time at various stages of its development since March. But it wasn't until this week that we received a near-finished preview copy of the game. To date, we've spent about 10 hours working on our garden to attract various species of piñata to it. Although we've already achieved many of the goals that we set for ourselves, we're not likely to tire of this open-ended game anytime soon.
Rare hasn't revealed how many different species of piñata there are in Viva Piñata yet, but we've encountered more than 30 so far. And we're pleased to report that adding them to our menagerie hasn't always been as straightforward as we expected. For the first few hours, after starting a new garden, you'll find that almost everything you do results in a new species finding its way to your piñata paradise in the making. But once the bottom of the piñata food chain is taken care of, things definitely get more challenging. Attracting piñata to your garden and, subsequently, convincing them to stay (and perhaps even romance their way into parenthood) is really only the beginning because your garden needs to function as both an ecosystem and a source of the game's currency, chocolate coins.
As you'd expect from a game that is aimed primarily at a young audience, the controls in Viva Piñata take no time at all to understand because the various functions of the context-sensitive buttons can be displayed on the screen at all times. The game does a good job of easing you into its numerous flower-shaped menus and gameplay features gently. So early on, your gardening arsenal will include little more than a well-used shovel and a bottomless packet of grass seeds. But it won't be long before you're entrusted with a watering can and more interesting seeds. And before you know it, you'll be giving serious thought to the layout of your garden in an attempt to maximize the quite small space that's available to you. Ultimately, your garden will expand to about four times the size of the area that you start with, but there are plenty of obstacles to overcome before that can happen.
One such obstacle is that certain species of piñata simply don't like each other. We've known for a while that some species will hunt others for food, but strangely the subject of mindless violence never came up during any of our meetings with Microsoft or Rare. The violence in the game is limited to colorful projectile attacks and a piñata that spills candy onto the ground as it breaks open. But the lack of melee weapons and blood doesn't make the piñata fights any less disruptive because they invariably end with one of the combatants requiring costly medical attention. The doctor in Viva Piñata is a guy in a blue monkey costume who races around in a toy car, and he's just one of several humanoid characters that we encountered for the first time this week.
We don't want to give too much away about the other characters, but we can tell you that after you encounter them for the first time, you'll have the option to call upon their services at any time via the "village" petal of your main in-game menu. Some of the characters, such as those you can hire to water your plants or get rid of weeds, require only a one-time payment. But others, such as the shopkeepers and the aforementioned doctor, will eat into your chocolate bank account every time you need something from them. One of the more interesting characters we encountered is a guy who, for a fee, will try to transform objects in your garden into other, more useful and valuable items. His methods aren't very reliable, but many of the items he creates appear impossible to acquire in any other way. And to date, everything he made for us has been extremely useful. We could give you examples, but that information is best left for a game guide. And if you're a fan of the Viva Piñata animated show, you're already--perhaps unwittingly--getting plenty of Pokémon-style gameplay hints.
If you're a fan of the show (or have at least watched one of the episodes available on the Xbox Live Marketplace), you'll also be familiar with its unique style, which is used in the game to great effect. We could try to explain what it is about Viva Piñata's visuals that make them so irresistible, but because this week is the first time that we've been permitted to take our own screenshots of the game, you'd be better off checking out our latest gallery. The frame rate has certainly improved since we last saw the game. Although it occasionally drops during autosaves, those hiccups are brief, and we haven't found them to be detrimental to the gameplay.
Speaking of gameplay, while we were playing Viva Piñata, passersby in the office most frequently asked the question: What is the goal? There is a story in the game, but it is present only as a series of entries in your journal that you'll unlock as your gardening level improves. Newly implemented missions that task you with packing specific piñatas into crates within a time limit also help to keep things interesting, although you're free to ignore them and just concentrate on your garden if you prefer. Truthfully, your goal in Viva Piñata is whatever you want it to be. For example, our main (not particularly ambitious) goals this week were to get cinnamonkeys into our garden and to successfully breed sherbats. The monkeys were relatively straightforward, but the bats required a little more effort because they first appeared in our garden as evil vampiric-looking sours. Our other goal, of course, has been to earn as many of Viva Piñata's 1,000 achievement points as possible. The game's achievements work in much the same way as those in Dead Rising. This is not because one of them requires you to kill more than 53,000 zombies but rather because there are 50 achievements, and each one is worth 20 points. Most of the achievement requirements are "secret" at the start of the game, but we've already unlocked 12, simply by playing the game.
Viva Piñata is currently scheduled for release in North America on November 9 and in Europe on December 1. We'll bring you more information on the game as those release dates get closer.
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- Microsoft Game Studios
- Rare Ltd.
- Virtual Life
- Release: Nov 9, 2006 »
- ESRB: Everyone
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