Viva Piñata Review

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            Viva Piñata

Review by SteerpikeFebruary 2007

Journey into Steerpike’s Mind

Anthropomorphization cracks me up, so you can imagine the chord struck by the idea of farming piñatas. Add funny words like “fudgehog,” and I’m powerless. I’d held off on the 360 purchase for months, but this made me cave. To be clear, I didn’t spend $500 just to raise piñatas (I bought Gears of War, too), but it was part of the reason, and it does, I think, provide a sort of window into my psyche. Friends, family and fellow office sheep are baffled by Viva Piñata, and they mock me. To a certain degree, I brought it on myself.

“I’ve never done acid,” said my friend Pete, watching the game’s cheery musical opening. “And now I don’t have to.”

Pete had some beer in him, but I’ve gotta say his comment is pretty accurate. Viva Piñata is bright and jovial and bizarre … and ghoulish, and prurient, and not for everyone. Surprisingly rich, it nonetheless squanders some potential by going sandbox when it should be mission-based, by simplifying stuff that should be complex, and by entangling things best left simple. Viva Piñata tries to be all things for all people, and the result is an exceptional game from a theoretical standpoint, but not always in practice.

You’ll find a lot of complaints in this review. Oddly, they mostly bubbled to the surface as I wrote it and don’t seriously detract from an otherwise enjoyable game. There’s much to like in Viva Piñata. It requires a lot of management and has a great sense of humor and outstanding production values. It is worth the attention of sandbox strategy fans—even those who are avoiding it because they dislike the notion of playing a “children’s” game.

Because Viva Piñata is not just spun sugar. It has a very real dark side, undiscussed in much of its press. Rare, Piñata’s creator, is best known for Conker and Perfect Dark; not exactly kids’ games. That its psychedelic big-top atmosphere conceals some powerfully adult undercurrents is one of Viva Piñata’s most charming traits.

Where the Truffleo Roam

On the lush tropical atoll of Piñata Island, feral piñatas roam free. A small human village caters to the elite Piñata Gardeners—individuals with the intestinal fortitude and horticultural knowhow to lure and tame wild piñatas. Your own muddy tract is bleakly piñata-less, nothing but a dream of piñata paradise. Essentially, Viva Piñata is a sandbox strategy game, a missionless Zoo Tycoon. You manage economics, attract, name and breed your candy-filled charges, keep them happy and healthy, stave off dangerous Sour Piñatas and other threats, maintain and improve your garden, and sell your livestock for a profit.

There are a story and recurring characters, but the true stars are the sixty unique, lovable and hilarious piñata breeds, those and the endless task of garden optimization. Titles like this are easy for strategy-minded players to get pleasantly lost in.  There’s lots to do and myriad ways to do it. That’s the beauty of Viva Piñata.

The other beauty of Viva Piñata is that it’s beautiful.  We still haven’t come close to seeing what the 360 is capable of, but Viva Piñata gives us a taste. The brilliantly colored flapping paper fur, gorgeous effects and adorable piñata animations are second to none. Enough has been said about the game’s graphics that I need not waste much space on it; suffice to say that everything you’ve heard is true.

Technical irritants are limited but irksome. This game would play better with a mouse than with thumbsticks; placing and orienting objects and structures is hugely clumsy. Your garden never gets as big as it should, and the camera never provides an adequate view.  The gaudy interface requires too many button pushes to perform common tasks. Overlong load times between screens and menus interfere with game flow. Given that Microsoft owns Rare, I can see why Viva Piñata was a 360 release, but it would have been better in Windows. Otherwise, it’s smooth, stable and polished—in fact, it’s the only 360 game I own that has never once returned the ubiquitous Disc Not Readable crash.

A friendly tutorial doles out concepts and game features one at a time. Eventually, village merchants become available, allowing you greater opportunity to improve your garden. There are literally dozens of enhancements, ranging from produce seeds to decorative rocks to bling for your piñatas. Just discovering everything takes hours, and though the game can be at times grindingly opaque, Viva Piñata is perfect for players who love to experiment.  There’s always something more to do, and it’s easy to put in many hours at a single sitting.

The sheer number of tasks you must personally manage might overwhelm children, while adults quickly realize that they are numerous but mindlessly simple. There’s the illusion of hundreds of things to do at all times, but many are repetitive drudge jobs with little impact on your garden, aside from being required. It creates a there/not there quality to the strategy element. It seems that a strategic approach would be useful, but in actual play it’s not often a prerequisite for success.

Example: you can build pens to separate piñata species, organizing your garden and isolating predators. But there’s no harm in going free range, letting them gyre and gimble in the wabe all day. If you do pen them, there’s no reason to ever let them out.  Support structures are optional, and piñatas don’t really need to socialize or wander. If the piñatas had a series of structure-based daily needs they preferred to handle themselves (like your creatures in Dungeon Keeper 2), it would have been a tighter play experience, as garden management would require more precision and planning.

A Piñata in Every Port

Officially, it is a children’s game—it even spawned an insipid Saturday morning cartoon. But Viva Piñata is too complex for kids and too simple for adults. In trying to reach both, it misses either. A mission-based structure would have reined it in somewhat and allowed adults and kids alike to learn at an appropriate pace; the sandbox side of the game should have been an option, not the whole of the single-player campaign. As it is, Viva Piñata is too sprawling, too open, and it becomes a game of repetition and trial and error.

For all the tutorial exposition and info in the in-game encyclopedia, core activities and concepts, like how to attract piñatas, receive limited explanation. You don’t get specific instructions on how to lure each specimen until you’ve done it by accident. Even when you meet all of the requirements, the wild breeds sometimes refuse to move in. Then, once they’re there, getting them to do what you want can be frustrating.

Take breeding. Each breed will only swap sauce when you meet certain requirements of food, prey, landscaping or whatever else puts them in a randy mood. Breeding low-level piñatas is pretty straightforward, but valuable species like Elephanillas and Chippopotomuses can be annoyingly recalcitrant. Charlie and Limelda, my Cocoadiles, never fulfilled the requirements for Cocoadile Sexytime because I couldn’t attract the prey they wanted. They enjoyed an entirely platonic relationship, never even held claws, and finally died unsatisfied and alone, Limelda succumbing to a piece of tainted candy and Charlie just dropping dead one day. Issues like this give the game an unwelcome nebulous feel, like you’re always missing something.

There are approximately one hojillion strategies and things to do, from fertilizing your plants to hybridizing piñatas to taming Sours. (Check it. That list doesn’t even scratch the surface). Problem is, they’re never explicitly defined. The manual says vaguely that you should try stuff; the encyclopedia says almost nothing and is hard to navigate anyway. I can’t help but feel I missed out on some depth simply because I didn’t want to spend hours experimenting with different combinations of fertilizer and plant seeds or combining random garden items to see what could be produced.

None of this seriously detracts from the game’s fun, but it may impact long-term fondness for the title, especially among adults.  Assuming young players can handle the enormous task list, they’ll happily while away hours with Viva Piñata. Hell, I happily whiled away more than a few myself, but around the 30-hour mark I began to grow tired of the lack of variance in activities—essentially, the lack of newness or challenge. I loved the thing, but the huge concessions made to allow for very young players finally began to grate on me.

Ironically, these concessions directly contradict much of the game experience.

Hot Piñata-on-Piñata Action

And so we come to the part that’s not receiving much coverage elsewhere.  The truth is, Viva Piñata is loaded with dark, disquieting imagery invisible to children but traumatically evident to adults.  Cannibalism, incest, bestiality, neglect and victimization of helpless creatures lie at the core of a game that is at times overtly carnal and spiced with entendre so transparent you’d be hard-pressed to imagine an interpretation that wasn’t sexually charged.

The sartorial fashion of Piñata Island can best be described as Animalized Dr. Seuss Bondage Queen; because of this, you must look closely to even realize that the game’s main characters are human beings, but human beings they are. There’s a huge bestio-masque fetish element to this game: Eyes Wide Shut meets National Geographic. People dress as Crayola goth animal hookers and coyly fetishize even the most innocuous of activities.

We learn that Leafos, the girl who provides the tutorial and prowls your garden dispensing advice, once “tried to take a Moozipan to bed;” a difficult phrase to misconstrue. Piñata hunter Gretchen Fetchem throatily invites you to give her a call “when you get into the menagerie thing.” The island’s pet store is owned by two absentee parents who leave their bored teenage daughter in charge, dressed as a cat; she makes thinly veiled sexual advances and frequently suggests that maybe you like your piñatas a little too much. As for those piñatas, they are genderless and ignorant of the danger of inbreeding. You’ll soon be breeding piñatas to their own mothers and overseeing GLBT multifectas.

There is also a macabre element. Deadly Sours enter your garden regularly, leaving poisoned candy in their wake (piñatas are suckers for candy)—brightly wrapped sweets that sicken and kill. Your only recourse until late in the game is to beat the Sour to death with a shovel. Your own piñatas will fight to the death at the drop of a hat, and predators like Badgesicles and Pretztails waste no time chasing down and consuming hapless piñata prey. When one dies, it bursts open, spilling candy innards across the garden. The shower of sweets ignites a frenzy among your other piñatas as they race over to gobble up the sugary viscera. And don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re raising these creatures so they can be sold off, bludgeoned apart and finally eaten by children.

Viva Piñata is grim, unsettling, sexually charged and, in many ways, quite grown-up. But Rare isn’t trying to pull a fast one on the world’s youth—I’d have no problem with very young kids playing, even by themselves, because you have to be both adult and somewhat deviant to get the subtext. I loved it.

Piñata’s Posterity

Viva Piñata’s duality, its failure to work equally for players young and old, hinders its march to greatness. Ironically, the game could have been ideal for both, even with all of the mature undertones, if Rare had simply missionized the game and left sandbox play as an option. Sandbox games are addictive because of the “one more turn” factor; the tradeoff is that it’s easy to become lost in them unless the challenge evolves alongside the player.  Viva Piñata asks little of you; there is no actual challenge. And adults will drift away once they figure that out.  All this means is that it’s a charming game that unfortunately won’t appeal to grownups for as long as it will appeal to their offspring.

Having put in about 40 hours, I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Only the last ten or so were unsatisfying, and even those were hardly torture. I’m disappointed because I think that as good as the game is, and it is really good, it misses many opportunities to be much better.

Rare is like Microsoft’s brightly colored pet parrot. Bought in the middle of the original Xbox’s life cycle, two Rare games were crucial 360 launch titles. Ironically, Perfect Dark Zero, the game everyone expected to be the 360’s killer app, was dismal.  Rare swooped in and trumped itself with Kameo—a game no one really expected much from at all. But the truth is that the purchase by Microsoft hasn’t been very good for Rare so far, or at least they’ve released some disappointing games (compared to their earlier work) since they’ve been under Redmond’s ownership.  Viva Piñata, despite the complaints, is the first strong reversal of that trend.

Old or young, if you’re looking for a beautiful, goofy, moderately disturbing game that encourages experimentation and guarantees many hours of fun, Viva Piñata is a safe bet. It absolutely could have been better, but it’s still a triumph in its own little way, and it’s proof that for all the recent five-out-of-tens, Rare still has it where it counts. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Rare Publisher: Microsoft Release Date: November 2006

Available for: Xbox 360

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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