Tiamatini

So, you know how back in 2006 everyone was playing Viva Piñata?  Well I wasn’t.  It just looked a little too much like a ‘kiddies game’ so I left it well alone.  As time went on more and more of my friends confessed to having played it, and one evening not so very long ago, when bored with my game collection, I decided to download it from XBL (after all, spending MSPs isn’t like spending real money…) and moments later I was kinda hooked…

Viva Piñata grabbed my attention and all I could think about was getting these piñatas to stay and make my garden all pretty…  If I’m honest, this captivation didn’t last as long as it perhaps could have, but for a few weeks at least my evenings were spent gardening and looking after my new found pets.  Read on to see why I would recommend this game to any of you who haven’t yet connected with your inner child and given it a go…

When you start playing you have a tiny garden full of trash which you need to smash with your rather rusty and inefficient shovel.  Each item you smash gives you money and then your assistant gives you a packet of never ending grass seed.  Seedos is a friendly neighbour who will give you a seed every time you talk to him, and the more new plants you grow the higher your level.  You will also start to attract piñatas from the moment you start planting grass.  When you have enough money you can build them houses and then try and mate them, which in turn gives you more money and helps raise your level.  As you level up you will get given more land to work with and better shovels, allowing you do dig ponds, necessary to attract some piñatas.  You can also find ways of changing your piñatas – making them eat certain fruits or flowers will cause them to change colour, again giving you exp, and money if you can then mate 2 changed animals.

There are however certain perils in this oh so lovely garden…  Sour creatures will come along and try to kill your piñatas, dropping candy that’s poisonous which you have to smash before your animals eat them.  Also, your piñatas will fall out and fight each other, and some piñatas eat others in order to become resident.  There are ways of dealing with this.  You need to make sure you have water features for your piñatas to cool down, and you can buy happy candy to try and keep their spirits up.  If a piñata gets unhappy enough they’ll leave your garden for good, which, I’ll be honest, is a little harrowing the first time it happens!  You will also find that your garden gets very full very quickly.  To deal with this you can either start a new garden and move some of the pinatas there, or you can focus on a particular breed and sell off the others.  I was loathed to sell any of mine at first, having become unusually attached to these fake paper pets, but after a while I, frankly, needed the money and the space so some of them just had to go.

This was all well and good, and kept me highly entertained for many an evening after work, but unfortunately it soon got rather old.  There is no ‘end point’ in Viva Piñata, you just keep building, and planting, and mating, and after a while you spend rather a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to happen.  I had grown every type of plant, and attracted as many piñatas as I could, my garden was full, I had employed as many workers as I could to do various different tasks, and I was pretty much left trying to attract the rarer piñatas into my garden, which is not as easy as just meeting the requirements – some of them just won’t come in.  This is where the game lost interest for me.  I had had my fun and now was left feeling rather pointless as I just watched day turn to night and back into day again.  I may go back to it and try building a second garden, spacing out my piñatas, maybe going for a different theme in each garden, but on the whole I feel like I’ve achieved all I can with this game for the time being.

Don’t get me wrong, this game is really good for the first several hours, and up until about Level 45, and it’s well worth a play if you haven’t already tried it, but unless they find a way of keeping it interesting at the higher levels, it has limited staying power.  That said, having looked at the new(ish) sequel Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, I think I may be returning to Piñata Island after all…