Product Description

Viva Pi ata invites gamers to create an immersive world where living pi atas inhabit an ever-changing environment. Beginning with a few basic tools, players build and take control of this environment, using their creativity and imagination to attract, protect and manage over 60 different pi ata species that can visit their world and make it their home. Utilizing hundreds of customizable elements, players can create a unique pi ata paradise.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1790 in Video Games
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 882224277273
• Published on: 2006-11
• Released on: 2006-11-11
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Xbox 360
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .58" h x 5.42" w x 7.56" l, .33 pounds

Features

• Deep Xbox Live integration allows you to swap tips, items, and more with friends.
• Create your own garden and more than 60 types of piñatas.
• Use easy, basic tools to develop an enviroment that reflects you.
• Regardless of skill level, find challenge in keeping out sour piñatas, perfecting your garden, and keeping your new piñata friends happy.
• Choose how much you want to control your piñatas by letting them run free or attempting to control their daily lives.

Amazon.com

Viva Piñata is a window to another world where wild-roaming, living Piñata animals inhabit a growing, changing garden world. Take control of this environment and the piñata within it, influencing its contents to create your very own pet paradise. The "Viva Piñata" gameplay experience presents a customizable, social and spontaneous world in which gamers play an absolutely crucial role. The world players create is an evolving paradise teeming with fantastic living piñata creatures and vibrant plant life, all determined by the player's choices and actions. "Viva Piñata" boasts the following qualities:

Rare releases their second exciting title for the Xbox 360.

Create the perfect environment for your favorite piñatas! View larger.

Watch as piñatas adopt to the garden spaces you've created for them. View larger.

Both sweet and sour piñatas will enter your garden. View larger.

Go online and help other piñata owners like yourself! View larger.

Creating a living garden

It's your very own world. Your choice of contents will determine which of the piñata species are attracted to your world, since they all have individual requirements. Sowing grass, digging ponds, planting flowers and growing trees all affect which of the unique piñatas you will see. It's not just about plants, either; there is a whole range of ornaments and structures that could be decisive. Your reward for creating an appealing paradise is to watch the piñatas visit and eventually reside there, which is where the fun really starts.

Getting to know and understand the personalities and requirements of your piñata is essential if you want them to stay happy and thrive. Make your world their ideal paradise, and they'll want to raise a family and expand your community. Players decide how much help they want from the local guides, shopkeepers and work force. Go it alone or get them involved as you choose. Once you have resident piñatas, you can begin to personalize your loyal community. Piñatas can be individually named and given their own personally designed tag to put on display as a declaration of their home turf. And the customization doesn't end there. You can make the colorful critters more distinctive by customizing them with all kinds of costumes and accessories.

A thriving community awaits

The "Viva Piñata" community is a rewarding place to be, whether you remain within the boundaries of your own world or venture out into the real world or your friend's piñata world via Xbox Live, the first and only global, unified online console games service. Via the Xbox Live online community, players can contact other gamers to lend a hand, lay down a competitive challenge or trade items. Plus, it's not just new piñata species that are drawn to your world; untamed sour piñatas with bad attitudes and troublemaking ruffians do their worst to spoil your creation and must be dealt with. Maintaining harmony within a growing community isn't always easy when rivalries, illness, injuries and even candy-spilling fights occur. If players turn their backs, who knows what their piñatas will do?

Special edition extras

Both kids and adults can break into the two-disc Special Edition "Viva Piñata" Xbox 360 game with added bonuses for the whole family to enjoy. The Special Edition game, available for a limited time, will include playable demos of the season's hottest family-friendly titles and an episode from the "Viva Piñata" animated series. In addition to the "Viva Piñata" game, which will allow players to create their own environment where they can attract and host more than 60 species of wild piñatas and customize piñata-filled adventures in their unique-ever-growing world, the Special Edition "Viva Piñata" game will include playable demos of LucasArts' "LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy," the arcade classic "Frogger," "Cloning Clyde," "Time Pilot," and "Marble Blast." Also included in the Special Edition "Viva Piñata" game will be a sneak peek at the wacky, zany, anything-can-happen animated TV series, produced by 4Kids Entertainment and Bardel Entertainment. With this full-le! ngth episode of the colorful animated series, Kids can experience Piñata Island for themselves, where multitudes of happy, colorful piñatas live the sweet life.

Customer Reviews

A Great Game, Not Just for Kids
In Viva Pinata you have inherited a garden in a fantasy world populated by living pinatas and an assortment of odd characters. Your mission is to build your garden to attract pinatas to live there. Everything you grow in your garden, including the pinatas, vegetables, flowers, and trees, can be sold for chocolate coins. You can use the coins to buy more seeds and grow more plants or to otherwise improve your garden. Viva Pinata is like a cross between Pokemon and The Sims and virtual pets, but I found that the result is greater than the sum of its parts!

This is a sandbox game of the best sort. You can make whatever decisions you want to and your garden can look however you want. You have the ability to dig ponds, grow grass, build houses for your pinatas, and all sorts of other activities that I am still discovering several hours into the experience. The decisions you make about how your garden develops will determine the kind of pinata who want to live there. The open-ended nature of the game is its best feature, and it really makes you feel like you are in control of the game's environment. The feeling of empowerment that kids receive playing Viva Pinata is enhanced by the excitement of constantly finding new things to do and play with.

I am impressed that a game that is so easy for kids to pick up is also so complex. My daughter is nine and was familiar with the controls and basic concepts within a half-hour. Yet the underlying concepts of the game are complicated. The skills I see her working on in this game primarily have to do with resource management, which as we adults know is critical for daily life. You have a limited amount of space for your garden (just like in real life), yet if you are not organized in your approach then the garden will quickly become a place of chaos. Kids will also learn the concepts of working to make money and how to budget for the next big item they need to improve their garden.

As other reviewers have stated, this looks like a game for kids, but it will suck an adult into its world just as easily. I couldn't wait for my kids to go to sleep the first night so I could start on my own garden. Time is greatly accelerated in the game, and the result is that you are very busy - you may suddenly look up from the game and see that a few hours have passed in the real world almost as quickly. The pinata are just the right amount of cute so that they are fun to watch, not annoying. There is no lull in the action for at least a few hours, at which time you may have been able to hire some helpers to take off some of the pressures of a big garden, such as watering and gathering your sellable items. This too is a good introduction to kids of the concept of people management. Lots of times you have to tell your helpers what to do, rather than just letting them do their own thing. Otherwise, their priority list is typically different from yours and those plants that you just planted may die because your helper was busy watering something less important.

Viva Pinata has way too much to offer to cover it all in such a short review. The environment is incredibly well done, from the sounds to the graphics. The game play is very addictive. Playing Viva Pinata actually got me excited to go out and do lawn work in the back yard! For parents wondering if this game is suitable for their kids, I will say that I am picky about what I let my kids watch and play and there is nothing here which offends me. There are all sorts of euphemisms around breeding pinatas (they call it "romancing") that sound very innocent but will make the adult chuckle. It is very tastefully done. And there is no doubt that your kids will be using their brains a lot more while playing this game than while playing the typical platform-style kids game. This is exactly the kind of game I was looking for to provide my kids with an enriching, non-violent video game experience. If Viva Pianta is an indication of the future of kids video games then the future is very promising.

Highly Addictive Gameplay
When I first heard about this game, it reminded me of Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Gamecube. I never liked Animal Crossing because the game was just a bunch of item collecting.

I'm glad to say that Viva Pinata is 100% better than Animal Crossing. You're basically building an ecosystem of pinatas in the game, there are alot of tradeoffs based on your actions.

You're even capable of sending items from your garden to people on your Friends list, which is a neat extra feature.

To give you an idea of how fun and addictive this game is, I bought Gears of War earlier in the week (one of the best games I've played in a long time) ... and I ended up playing Viva Pinata instead of Gears over the weekend.

Ground-Breaking
Viva Pinata - where should one begin on describing the game's deepest complexities? In layman's terms - Viva Pinata is not just a kid's game. In fact, it requires higher thinking and could easily be problematical to younger audiences. I've been playing this game for a few weeks now, and while I'm not playing it religiously, it's still wickedly addictive.

Many people are referring and comparing Viva Pinata to Nintendo's Animal Crossing. While the games are similar in many facets, they're just as different as they are the same. I was never a fan of Animal Crossing, never. I traded the game almost immediately. After all the hype, acclaim and positive reviews, I thought Animal Crossing would be a very safe bet. I was wrong.

After reading about Viva Pinata, I thought this would be Animal Crossing all over again, so I approached very cautiously. Again, much praise and positive reviews. So, I took the risk. This time however, it was a purchase I'm more than happy with. There's many more possibilities with Viva Pinata. Read the following to hear details about the game itself.

First and foremost, the concept behind the game is the driving force of its greatness. You construct, manage and watch your very own ecosystem flourish before your very eyes. This is no cakewalk however, if you fail to manage your garden correctly, you'll find yourself having to improve the conditions in order to advance. Secondly, the graphics are sheer amazing. Some real eye candy here. It doesn't get much better than this visual wise. If you're in a position to buy a game for the entire family, there's no better fit than Viva Pinata. If you're into complex and challenging games, and are looking for something to break away from your typical run-of-the-mill FPS or RPG, you'll find Viva Pinata a great getaway.