TGS 06: Viva Piñata Impressions

TOKYO--Earlier today, in a hotel room just a short walk from the Tokyo Game Show, we met with representatives from Microsoft and Rare to check out the latest build of Viva Piñata for the Xbox 360. We weren't allowed to get our hands on the game on this occasion (perhaps at X06 next week?), but we did spend a full 30 minutes watching the game in action, during which we saw a reasonable amount that was new.

Fittingly, our demo got under way at the very start of the game, where you'll learn that the world that the piñatas call home is in ruins. The area of land that we were presented with looked quite unlike anything that we've seen in Viva Piñata before, with hard ground, very few plants, no picturesque pools of water, and not a single piñata to be found. You first goal, then, will be to make your chunk of land more appealing to piñatas using the only tool at your disposal--a shovel.

After using your shovel to break up the dirt in an area of the map, you'll have fulfilled the criteria needed to attract the attention of worm piñatas, who are low maintenance but, since they occupy the bottom of the food chain, essential in any good piñata garden. As we watched Ryan Stevenson from Rare working on his new garden, we noticed that the worms setting up home there attracted the attention of a hungry sparrow (sparrowmint) piñata, and when long grass was planted it, didn't take long for a grass snake (syrupent) to find its way into the garden.

Piñatas that are loitering outside or simply passing through your garden will always be black and white, and it's not until they decide to move in that they'll gain their bright coloration. The 60-plus different species of piñatas in the game will require different things from a garden before they're tempted to look around, and then you'll have to fulfil additional (unknown) criteria in order for them to move in and yet more criteria before they'll be happy enough in your garden to consider mating. We were told that within just two hours of starting a new game your garden will be unlike any other, which is easy to believe given the degree of freedom that you have to shape the land--even when armed only with a shovel. As you progress, you'll gain additional tools for your arsenal, including a watering can, which, like the shovel, can be upgraded so that it's easier to work with. An upgraded watering can, for example, might hold more water or refill more quickly between uses.

About 10 minutes into our meeting, Stevenson loaded up a garden that he'd been working on for around 15 hours already, which was inhabited by a number of different piñatas that we hadn't seen before. We didn't catch all of their names, but there were hedgehogs (fudgehogs), squirrels, horses (horstachios), cats (kittyfloss), and, at one point, a fox that was stalking a chicken. The fox managed to catch and eat the chicken (or at least the candies inside it), at which point we found out that piñatas never die, they simply disappear from your garden and then reappear right outside it. Food chains are a part of nature, of course, so the only thing you'll have to be mindful of is that if your garden has too many predators in it, the piñatas that they prey on will be less inclined to move in.

Your goal in Viva Piñata, then, regardless of what objectives you set for yourself, is to establish and maintain an ecosystem that's capable of supporting itself. To do that, you'll need your piñatas to breed, which is achieved via a simplistic minigame that you can play only once you have a pair of piñatas who are interested in each other (as indicated by heart icons over their heads) and a residence for them to go and "romance dance" in. The minigame tasks you with guiding one of the piñatas to the other through a maze filled with dangerous sours. If you manage to unite them, you'll be treated to a movie of that species' unique mating dance (the fudgehog one we saw was very amusing), but if you fail, you'll have to wait for the next time that the mood takes them to try again. After the piñata procreation ritual is completed, an egg will be delivered by a stork piñata.

Piñatas that reside in your garden, regardless of how they got there, can be customized. Visual customizations include all manner of clothing accessories, and among the most memorable that we got see modelled by a fox today were a monocle, a traffic cone hat, a policeman's helmet, and a pair of rabbit ears. A large number of accessories will be available in the game's shop from the outset, and additional ones will become available as you unlock them in-game or download them from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Each piñata also has a "tag," much like you might expect to find on a stuffed animal. These tags can be customized with different patterns and emblems, as well as with the piñata's vital information, such as where it was born and what name you've given it.

Wild and sour piñatas cannot be customized until they're tamed, and although it will definitely be possible for you to dispose of the evil red-and-black sour piñatas, we're assured that the benefits of taming them will be well worth the effort. If you simply choose to break open a sour egg-stealing maccaraccoon, for example, the sour candy that comes out of it will make your piñata sick when it eats it. If you can figure out how to tame it, though, you'll find that maccaraccoons are as good at protecting eggs from other predators as they are at stealing them. Snail piñatas were also cited as an example during our meeting, since the sour versions wander around the garden eating all of your plants, while tamed ones will eat only weeds.

Other options for dealing with sours will include erecting totem poles that keep certain species away from your garden or simply sticking problematic sours into a crate and shipping them off to a friend via Xbox Live. Your friend will have the option to send it right back to you, of course, and it's worth noting that when a crate arrives you'll have no idea what's in it until it's opened. We asked what would happen if we chose to send all of our sours to a friend who simply ignored the crates, allowing us to get rid of our problem without really making it our friend's, but neither of the Rare representatives seemed to know the answer. Perhaps we'll find out at X06 next week.

At the end of our meeting, talk turned to the future of Viva Piñata, which appears to be a game that will evolve over time, provided you have access to Xbox Live. The official line is that no concrete plans for the game's postrelease development have been confirmed at this time but that once Rare and Microsoft are able to see how people are enjoying the game and what new features are being requested, they'll be in a great position to react because it has been developed with upgrades in mind. The option to go online and look at gardens belonging to your friends, for example, is a feature that won't be in the game at launch but that appears to already be under consideration. The possibility of live and/or seasonal events and weather were also mentioned briefly. We look forward to bringing you more information on Viva Piñata next week.