jimmcq
05-14-2008, 01:42 AM
Earlier today I had the opportunity to play Trouble in Paradise for a couple hours at the 2008 Xbox 360 Spring Showcase in San Francisco. I assume that you've seen the announcement (http://pinataisland.info/forum/showthread.php?p=175317), and that you've read the interview (http://pinataisland.info/forum/showthread.php?p=175316), so I'm going to try and give you my impressions of what I saw beyond all that.
I think a lot of people would have been happy if this was just the same game with a few more pinata species, but it is easy to see that this is a lot more than that. It all feels very familiar, but at the same time Trouble in Paradise feels a lot more polished. Many of the biggest annoyances from the original game have been smoothed out.
I'll warn you in advance that this was a pre-release version of the game, and it isn't easy to remember every little detail after seeing such a dizzying array of new features, so I can't guarantee that in the final version of the game everything will work exactly as I describe it.
One of my own complaints about the original game is that there were a lot of annoying pop-up messages that got in the way and slowed things down. Now the same information is still relayed, but it isn't in such a gameplay-stopping manner.
Another of my other complaints about the original was that it just took too many different steps to grow a plant to maturity, now there is a Seed Bag which cuts out many of the tedious steps in purchasing a seed. But it doesn't stop there, that feature is context sensitive... so if you pull up the seed bag when you already have a plant selected it becomes the 'Fertilizer Bag' eliminating even more tedium of going through all the menus.
Many of the other features work in this same intelligent context-sensitive manner. The 'Pinata Finder' lets you easily find any pinata in the garden, and you can pull it up with a single button press... but if you hit that same button while a plant is selected, it becomes the plant finder.
You will now find an array of signposts around your garden that either contain helpful information or easy access to some of the new features. For example there is a Help sign that takes you straight to the How-To section of the journal. There also sign-posts that can take you off to the Dessert Desert and the Pinarctic regions... more on those later.
You now have a 'Bouncer Board' at the edge of the garden. After you get the Master Romancer award for a particular species you can add them to the board, and they will banned from entering your garden again. That is nice for keeping those pesky predators from eating your precious Wild-card pinatas.
Speaking of Wild-cards, every species now has three different wild-card variations to discover. Getting a wild-card is no longer just a tiny random chance, you can now earn every single one just by meeting all the right requirements. The general idea is that each species will probably have one wild-card version that is easy to find and achieve, but the other two will be more difficult to discover.
The Romance Mini-games have gotten quite a make-over. You can still use the top-down view from the original game, but you can also choose to change the camera view to a third-person 3D view from within the maze. There are also new loathers trying to stop you, such as ones that actually chase you when you get near.
The village has a new resident, Langston Lickatoad. Langston is there to issue challenges and to monitor your progress in fulfilling one of the overall goals of the game which is refilling the database of full-candiosity pinatas.
The Dessert Desert and Pinartic regions were not fully developed yet, but they seem to be areas where you can go off to find new pinata species and bring them back your garden. The basic idea is to purchase a trap and fill it with bait to lure in a pinata. Once captured they can be sent back to your garden.
The camera tool is really nice. The camera basically allows you take a screenshot of anything you see in game. You can then go to the journal to view all of the pictures you took, and from there upload them to the vivapinata.com website. I didn't get to try the upload feature, but supposedly the game will figure out what you took a picture of and include a Pinata Vision barcode with your image.
Pinata Vision is one of the most interesting new features, and it also seems to be the most difficult to really understand without seeing it work. In its most basic form, a Pinata Vision card looks much like a trading card (the size and shape of a standard card from a deck of playing cards). Along one edge is a special barcode that can be scanned using the Xbox Live Vision Camera to affect your game. For example a card with a Kittyfloss on it will place a Kittyfloss in your garden when scanned.
Pinata Vision images don't have to be in the trading card format, it can be something that you printed yourself from an image your downloaded, or it can even be an image on a device like an iPhone or Zune. Just show the image with the barcode to your Vision Cam and it should scan.
Pinata Vision can do a lot more than just add pinatas though... It can change the time of day in your garden, change the weather, summon Professor Pester or send him away. The cards can include multiple barcodes to do really more advanced things like create a pinata with a specific name and accessories, etc.
One of the ideas behind Pinata Vision is that it will cost you a pinata's value in chocolate coins to turn it into a scannable barcode, and then it will also cost the recipient chocolate coins to scan it into their garden... So you can't quite use it to fill your entire garden for free, but you can use it as a method to literally email (or snail mail) a pinata to a friend rather than using the in-game Post Office.
UPDATE: There were a couple of other features that I forgot to mention in my original write-up... You can now use the shovel (I assume an upgraded version) to dig large areas at once by just marking the corners of the area to be dug.
The other interesting feature was the golf ball sweet. It comes in a variety of colors, but the pinatas aren't interested in eating it. When you highlight it with your cursor a number appears above it indicating the number of times that it has been hit with a shovel. When you have you shovel out and highlight a golf ball then the menu shows a 'Putt' option. How near or far the camera is zoomed in changes the strength of your swing and the angle of the camera changes how high or low the ball will fly. Your goal is to hit the ball into a seed hole at which point you will get a prize such as chocolate coins. There is a also a flag decoration which looks just like the flags you would expect to see on a golf course. This is just another example of a small addition to the game that I can see people building entire gardens around.
UPDATE 2: I also got to play around with getting the pinatas to perform tricks. Each animal will have two tricks that can be 'learned' and then the new trick-stick tool can be used to get the animal to perform them whenever you like. For example after you feed a Cactus Seed to a Camello you can get it to perform a trick where it whips out a canteen of water from its hump.
The same-box co-op was briefly demonstrated... as the second player performs tasks in the garden, they can collect "magic". When their cursor is filled with this magic, they can then perform actions normally saved for Helpers such as healing a sick pinata or transforming one item into another.
Don't forget that Trouble in Paradise is out in September 2008 and there will be a demo on the Xbox Live Marketplace before launch. There were plenty of other little details that I'm forgetting about, but if you still have more questions about the game post them at http://pinataisland.info/forum/showthread.php?t=9055
I think a lot of people would have been happy if this was just the same game with a few more pinata species, but it is easy to see that this is a lot more than that. It all feels very familiar, but at the same time Trouble in Paradise feels a lot more polished. Many of the biggest annoyances from the original game have been smoothed out.
I'll warn you in advance that this was a pre-release version of the game, and it isn't easy to remember every little detail after seeing such a dizzying array of new features, so I can't guarantee that in the final version of the game everything will work exactly as I describe it.
One of my own complaints about the original game is that there were a lot of annoying pop-up messages that got in the way and slowed things down. Now the same information is still relayed, but it isn't in such a gameplay-stopping manner.
Another of my other complaints about the original was that it just took too many different steps to grow a plant to maturity, now there is a Seed Bag which cuts out many of the tedious steps in purchasing a seed. But it doesn't stop there, that feature is context sensitive... so if you pull up the seed bag when you already have a plant selected it becomes the 'Fertilizer Bag' eliminating even more tedium of going through all the menus.
Many of the other features work in this same intelligent context-sensitive manner. The 'Pinata Finder' lets you easily find any pinata in the garden, and you can pull it up with a single button press... but if you hit that same button while a plant is selected, it becomes the plant finder.
You will now find an array of signposts around your garden that either contain helpful information or easy access to some of the new features. For example there is a Help sign that takes you straight to the How-To section of the journal. There also sign-posts that can take you off to the Dessert Desert and the Pinarctic regions... more on those later.
You now have a 'Bouncer Board' at the edge of the garden. After you get the Master Romancer award for a particular species you can add them to the board, and they will banned from entering your garden again. That is nice for keeping those pesky predators from eating your precious Wild-card pinatas.
Speaking of Wild-cards, every species now has three different wild-card variations to discover. Getting a wild-card is no longer just a tiny random chance, you can now earn every single one just by meeting all the right requirements. The general idea is that each species will probably have one wild-card version that is easy to find and achieve, but the other two will be more difficult to discover.
The Romance Mini-games have gotten quite a make-over. You can still use the top-down view from the original game, but you can also choose to change the camera view to a third-person 3D view from within the maze. There are also new loathers trying to stop you, such as ones that actually chase you when you get near.
The village has a new resident, Langston Lickatoad. Langston is there to issue challenges and to monitor your progress in fulfilling one of the overall goals of the game which is refilling the database of full-candiosity pinatas.
The Dessert Desert and Pinartic regions were not fully developed yet, but they seem to be areas where you can go off to find new pinata species and bring them back your garden. The basic idea is to purchase a trap and fill it with bait to lure in a pinata. Once captured they can be sent back to your garden.
The camera tool is really nice. The camera basically allows you take a screenshot of anything you see in game. You can then go to the journal to view all of the pictures you took, and from there upload them to the vivapinata.com website. I didn't get to try the upload feature, but supposedly the game will figure out what you took a picture of and include a Pinata Vision barcode with your image.
Pinata Vision is one of the most interesting new features, and it also seems to be the most difficult to really understand without seeing it work. In its most basic form, a Pinata Vision card looks much like a trading card (the size and shape of a standard card from a deck of playing cards). Along one edge is a special barcode that can be scanned using the Xbox Live Vision Camera to affect your game. For example a card with a Kittyfloss on it will place a Kittyfloss in your garden when scanned.
Pinata Vision images don't have to be in the trading card format, it can be something that you printed yourself from an image your downloaded, or it can even be an image on a device like an iPhone or Zune. Just show the image with the barcode to your Vision Cam and it should scan.
Pinata Vision can do a lot more than just add pinatas though... It can change the time of day in your garden, change the weather, summon Professor Pester or send him away. The cards can include multiple barcodes to do really more advanced things like create a pinata with a specific name and accessories, etc.
One of the ideas behind Pinata Vision is that it will cost you a pinata's value in chocolate coins to turn it into a scannable barcode, and then it will also cost the recipient chocolate coins to scan it into their garden... So you can't quite use it to fill your entire garden for free, but you can use it as a method to literally email (or snail mail) a pinata to a friend rather than using the in-game Post Office.
UPDATE: There were a couple of other features that I forgot to mention in my original write-up... You can now use the shovel (I assume an upgraded version) to dig large areas at once by just marking the corners of the area to be dug.
The other interesting feature was the golf ball sweet. It comes in a variety of colors, but the pinatas aren't interested in eating it. When you highlight it with your cursor a number appears above it indicating the number of times that it has been hit with a shovel. When you have you shovel out and highlight a golf ball then the menu shows a 'Putt' option. How near or far the camera is zoomed in changes the strength of your swing and the angle of the camera changes how high or low the ball will fly. Your goal is to hit the ball into a seed hole at which point you will get a prize such as chocolate coins. There is a also a flag decoration which looks just like the flags you would expect to see on a golf course. This is just another example of a small addition to the game that I can see people building entire gardens around.
UPDATE 2: I also got to play around with getting the pinatas to perform tricks. Each animal will have two tricks that can be 'learned' and then the new trick-stick tool can be used to get the animal to perform them whenever you like. For example after you feed a Cactus Seed to a Camello you can get it to perform a trick where it whips out a canteen of water from its hump.
The same-box co-op was briefly demonstrated... as the second player performs tasks in the garden, they can collect "magic". When their cursor is filled with this magic, they can then perform actions normally saved for Helpers such as healing a sick pinata or transforming one item into another.
Don't forget that Trouble in Paradise is out in September 2008 and there will be a demo on the Xbox Live Marketplace before launch. There were plenty of other little details that I'm forgetting about, but if you still have more questions about the game post them at http://pinataisland.info/forum/showthread.php?t=9055