There's a deep and engaging strategy challenge underneath Viva Pi�ata's candy-coated exterior but PC porting problems leave a sour aftertaste.
My mother used to tell me "Don't judge a book by its cover." Sure, it's a cliche so old it made Aesop's kids roll their eyes (though back then it was probably something like "don't judge a scroll by the ribbon it's tied with"). But the reason these things become cliches is because they represent some fundamental truth. Case in point: Viva Pinata. On the surface it looks like a kid's game about creating a garden where a variety of brightly colored papier-mache animals can happily frolic the day away. Dig a little deeper into this PC port of an Xbox360 title and what emerges is an absolutely riveting title filled with all kinds of strategic depth and plenty of challenges to overcome. Only a number of technical issues and porting problems make the game inferior to its console cousin.
The storyline -- such as it is -- posits a magical place called Pinata Island where Pinatas are grown, not made, until they're eventually called into the world to entertain at children's parties. In latter days, however, Pinata Island has fallen into disrepair as the former gardener Jardiniero is too old to continue tending the fields. The player is initially presented with a small plot of land in the midst of a trash-strewn wasteland that needs to be beaten back into a living ecosystem. They begin with a beaten shovel and a ratty watering can along with a few other tools to start reclaiming the island. The goal, of course, is to once again make Pinata Island a pristine wonderland filled with all manner of rare and valuable Pinatas.
In order to reclaim Pinata Island, the player will need to learn all the ins and outs of Pinata ecology. The lowest form of Pinata (called whirlms) is attracted to a player's garden merely by having enough rich earth or short grass. As players continue to add amenities to their garden, whether it be different varieties of plant, statues, paths, fences, tall grasses, ponds and other kinds of environments, housing for various creatures, trees or crops to drop specific types of foods, new kinds of Pinatas will be attracted to their garden. Fulfill enough of their basic needs and a Pinata will stop being a visitor and become a permanent resident. Fulfill a few more and the player can even breed their Pinatas together and make little baby Pinatas (the mating dance is very cute and completely family-friendly). As there are over 70 varieties of Pinata in the game, some of them extremely rare, there's a lot of gameplay involved in "catching 'em all."
It doesn't take too much playtime before Viva Pinata reveals itself as much more than a glorified gardening sim. This is a game with serious strategic chops. The Pinata ecology is quite complicated and while some of the earlier creatures such as Mousemallows and Pretztails don't require much in the way of upkeep, many of the rarer more valuable Pinatas will need huge amounts of garden space devoted to a particular type of terrain, the presence of certain types of plants and other, lesser Pinatas to serve as a food source. Since these lesser Pinatas each have their own requirements, running a successful garden quickly balloons into an extraordinarily fun strategic challenge. Much of the player's game time is just spent running around trying to get the garden's ecological balance just right while simultaneously weeding out red-colored "sour Pinatas" that drop angry candy that makes good Pinatas fight and smash each other. If the player is successful, new tools and new services open up and the amount of arable land increases.
The whimsical setting of the game serves as the basis for some absolutely fantastic art design and animation. The Pinatas themselves are adorable with just enough wink-and-a-nod edginess to them to keep them from being too saccharine. Watching these creatures amble around the garden is a delight as their fantastic animations -- while not actually resembling a real animal -- do a wonderful job of making the garden feel like a living space. Even better, the game offers a constant stream of delightful graphic surprises ranging from hilarious movies of the "mating dance" Pinatas perform to the capability of peeking into their housing and seeing what they're up to at home. It turns out doenuts are big fans of disco -- who knew?
Unfortunately there are a few bugs in Viva Pinata's garden, and they're not the kind you can get rid of with bug spray, either. The game seems very unstable and has been known to crash frequently because of incompatibilities with other resident programs. In our case, the game crashed every few minutes until we tracked down and shut off a small Windows add-on program that was included by the PC manufacturer. Other gamers have reported the game being incompatible with certain anti-virus programs, slowdowns on dual-core systems and graphic glitches such as invisible animals.
Then there's the manifestly not-ready-for-prime-time Games for Windows Live. We had enormous problems linking the game up with our Live account -- even going so far as to create a whole separate G4WL account for it -- only to find that the G4WL program itself is causing crashes on some users' computers. Not using Games for Windows Live isn't an option, either, as the game requires it in order to save a game (a true "wtf?" moment).
Unfortunately once we got the game working, we found that the game's minimal online capability is a tragically missed opportunity. Online connectivity consists of merely the ability to send individual items or Pinatas to online friends -- and only to those who have the PC version. Cross-platform trade is apparently verboten on Pinata Island which kind of flushes away one of the few interesting features of Games for Windows Live. The tragedy is that this is a game that could easily support the kind of vibrant creative community that's clustered around The Sims games but without the capability to create new items, breed and trade new varieties of Pinata or view or visit other people's farms, such a group will probably never form.
Other problems are endemic to the poor nature of the PC porting process. Instead of re-working the control system to be mouse and keyboard friendly, the game is controlled using an awkward system of button clicks and color-coded mode buttons. The game sports hotkeys but it often took multiple presses to get them to register during our testing. The camera can't pull back far enough to give a real sense of the garden's overall picture nor is it particularly easy to control. When a PC game is easier to control using an Xbox 360 controller (the game is control pad-compatible) than the mouse, it's a sure sign of a quick-and-dirty PC port and a great game really suffers because of it.
In the end, it's a testament to the game's charm and deeply satisfying strategy that we still wanted to play despite the problems. Wonderful family-friendly "farming sims" like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing have long been the exclusive province of consoles. Viva Pinata certainly deserves to be mentioned in such august company and it's a great option for PC gamers who don't own a console and are willing to push past the bugs (or wait for the inevitable patch). If only Microsoft could have exercised a bit more of the gardener's patience and attention to detail, Viva Pinata could have been a bumper crop of gaming goodness.
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