Latest revision as of 09:21, 15 August 2009

The Viva Piñata gameplay experience presents a customizable, social and spontaneous world in which gamers play an absolutely crucial role. It is not just a garden, it is an evolving paradise teeming with fantastic living piñata creatures and vibrant plant life, all determined by the player's choices and actions.

Game Specifics

Viva Piñata feels like being given the opportunity to create the world you’ve always wanted to have. It’s about creativity, customization, freedom of expression and personalizing the world around you to attract these piñatas into your garden, see their personalities, and help them be happy.

The garden starts out as a neglected brown landscape and you have to go about transforming it from a very basic level. As you start turning that brown patch into a garden by using your garden tools, you’ll attract piñatas who will help develop your land and, in turn, attract other piñatas. There’s a whole food chain of piñatas and each one depends on another, so as your garden grows you will see a real evolutionary process!

Another aspect of Viva Piñata is managing problems that creep up in your garden. These problems become harder to manage as you become a more capable gardener at higher levels. From sickness to weeds to bad-tempered visitors (Sours, Ruffians, and Professor Pester), there's a lot of potential for your garden to backslide if not carefully attended. Piñata can be broken by visitors or sickness or they can become so scared or unhappy that they leave your garden and return to the wild.

The fun of this game is not only in creating a beautiful garden with interesting piñata species, but also discovering surprises in lots of places along the way. Piñata can change in unexpected ways as you treat them to different experiences and demonstrate your skill with romancing. Whether you decide to focus on achievements and becoming the highest level gardener, finding out the secrets of Piñata Island, or just creating the most beautiful garden possible, your garden is yours to create and manage how you like.

Manipulating/Interacting with your Piñatas

By selecting a piñata and then clicking on another piñata you can get them to interact with each other. But be warned: they’re all very temperamental and spontaneous so they’re not always going to do as you wish. For instance, you could tell a horse piñata to go somewhere else in the garden but he may be happy where he is and refuse to go. Or two different species of piñatas may fall out with each other if you keep them too close together.

The worms are basic piñatas. They’re very obedient. Tell them to go somewhere or do something and they’ll be sure to follow your lead. The more advanced the piñata, the more likely they are to do things you don’t expect. But a lot of the fun is just getting your garden to the stage where you can sit back and let the animals go about their business.

In game you have a cursor very similar to what you have in "The Sims", as in you have a circular area you can move around and click on things to select or interact with them.