Pimp your piñata
Viva Piñata has a steady learning curve that allows you to become accustom to the simple controls and the menu system. Before you know it, your garden is full of plant life and curious creatures that have unique personalities and wander, run, fly, slither and hop around your garden seeking fulfilment. In the journal, which you are given at the start of the game, you have a comprehensive encyclopaedia which provides a great reference guide that gives you information on attracting piñatas and keeping them as residents; it also gives you an overview of the garden’s contents, allowing you to see which items you could add to the garden or which items you could sell to the village shops.
Buying and selling is an important aspect in Viva Piñata, because the more money you can accumulate the more you’ll be able to spend on bringing your garden up to scratch. Once you get two residents of the same breed in your garden, you’ll be able to romance them by building a house and by carrying out two set objectives, such as getting them to eat a piece of fruit or half a dozen daisies. They’ll then breed and the baby piñata can be sold to make money. By using the cursor on screen you can click on one piñata and direct it towards the other one. They’ll do a mating dance and then head off the privacy of their home to breed the new baby piñata. As you produce babies you can sell them in the village store and therefore be able to buy more expensive items in the shops, hire workers to help in the garden, build more homes for the piñatas or even accessorise the ones that already dwell in your peaceful haven.
Click for larger imageThere are over 60 piñatas that can be attracted to your garden, some which rely on eating other animals to survive and others which can be cross bred to create variant piñatas. Viva Piñata cleverly sucks you into its world by the amount of experimentation at your fingertips. You can change the colour of piñatas by feeding them colourful plants, cross-breed them in order to create variants, customise them by buying accessories such as sunglasses and hats and even name them. As the game progresses there becomes an increasing amount of tasks to fulfil and a number of obstacles that are thrown in your way to make life more difficult.
Throughout the daily cycle you’ll need to keep an eye out for sour piñatas who are intent on disrupting your peaceful oasis; they’ll sometimes eat other piñatas, destroy your plants or make them sick. There are a number of different ways to deal with them, such as by hitting them with a shovel or sending another piñata to attack them. The tranquillity of the garden isn’t just affected by these rogue piñatas and trouble is occasionally caused by your residents who will fight against each other.
Click for larger imageYou’ll be dashing around the garden trying to keep your piñatas happy by experimenting with their food intake or breeding them to make cash and popping in and out of the village stores to buy and sell numerous items. At times Viva Piñata was so hectic, hundreds of different scenarios were whizzing through my head, that I needed to rest my brain and eyes on numerous occasions. As soon as you think about doing one thing in your garden, something else will crop up and you’ll go off on a completely different tangent.