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Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending Rare’s Viva Piñata, a series now four games deep thanks to two spin-offs, has always seemed like an odd fit for the Xbox 360 crowd. A property that seems squarely targeted at kids, “kidults” and Rare die-hards — oh, and the subject of merchandising opportunities — seems to have a “love it or hate it” appeal, as the gathering of brightly coloured papercraft beasts accomplished by smart horticulture might be kind of a hard thing to wrap one’s brain around. The sequel, Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise, likely won’t do much to change minds, as it sticks close to the gameplay of the first, while giving hardcore fans of piñata herding more of what they love.
Can a gamer who wasn’t a fan of the first find something to love in Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise? We gathered up some love and hate to find out.
Rare has just launched a community site for Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise. By Signing in with your LIVE ID, you can display your game stats as well as share pictures of your Gardens and any Piñata Vision cards you have found.
Rare has released the first official Viva Piñata Vision Card for use in Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise.
As we covered back in May, Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise for the Xbox 360 can be used with the Xbox Live Vision Camera and a selection of special cards. Players can wave the cards in front of the camera to invoke certain game effects.
Players will be able to download free cards, which can then be printed out — or just displayed on a PDA or mobile phone screen held in front of the camera. Players can also create their own cards for online trading.
It looks like it will work a bit like the PS3 game Eye Of Judgement although Rare say that the game will be fully playable without the card/camera combo.
“The Vision Camera just adds a new dimension to Piñata and how you can interact with the game. Vision cards are really versatile, by showing one of the cards to the Vision Camera you can affect the weather, the time, garden items, piñatas, you can do just about anything” – Ryan Stevenson, Rare
The first Piñata Vision Card goes online! [MundoRare]
Oh, so here’s a release date for the Xbox 360 Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise! September 5th is when the follow-up in the candy-filled franchise hits — and it strikes me, you know, what an odd idea! Who’d have ever thought that reviving fandom for piñatas, that semi-relic toy we used to bash as candy-crazed youngsters (you don’t really see ‘em anymore, huh?) would make such a decent idea for a gardening/breeding/life sim?
Anyway, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise adds 30 new piñata species, more co-op and gameplay modes, and the official announcement promises that Piñata Island has gotten even bigger. Crecente had a look at it recently and found that it seems to tone up what could’ve been seen as problem zones in the original.
Full details after the jump!
Courtesy of Rare, here’s four new screens for the upcoming Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. Things are looking lovely, there’s no doubt of that. But the first one looked (and played!) lovely, too. And still, nobody really paid any attention. Will genie huts and birds with gas masks change that? Probably not, but there’s always hope!
newVideoPlayer("vivapinata610_kotaku.flv", 500, 301","); Here we see Professor Pester from the Viva Piñata cartoon series, explaining his latest evil plot to tear open our paper friends and devour their innards to his hapless minions, while at the same time showing us around some of the new locales included in the upcoming Viva Piñata: Trouble In Paradise.
While the game is looking great, I am a bit disturbed by this Professor Pester character. Pester just doesn’t seem to fit a guy who wants to gnaw on your intestines, liquorice-based as they may be.
Only a company twisted enough to market a game to kids where the goal is to feed cute animals their dead and mate with their siblings could come up with this unholy pairing. Speaking to MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo, Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise designer reveals that they had successfully connected the Xbox 360 and DS versions of the paper animal game…but it was too late.
It sounds like Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise was designed to deal with one big issue the original title had.
“It looked like a kids game, but was quite difficult to play,” said a Rare developer walking us through the game. “We kept the basic principal, you’re in a garden and trying to attract animals to it.”
But the team’s done a lot to simplify the game and make it more accessible to a wider audience. Chief among the changes is a co-op mode that lets you play in the garden with friend. They’ve also added a fun mode which gives gamers the ability to buy just about anything in the game, removes the bad guys and turns the garden into an instant gratification sandbox.
newVideoPlayer("vivapinata2.flv", 475, 376,""); Here’s some video from the hot-off-the-presses Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. Just wait a second through the vaguely unsettling snuffling and groaning animal sounds, and be treated to some cute footage of pinatas doing their thing – that’s to say, frolicking about, riding trains and wearing hats – just as if they were in their natural habitat.
I don’t actually ever, y’know, go into nature or anything like that, but I’m imagining this is exactly what it looks like.
During my dinner with Shane Kim and Kudo Tsunoda I started talking with Kim about Rare’s relatively checkered history with Microsoft.
In the late 90s Rare established themselves as a top-tier studio, producing such classics as GoldenEye and Donkey Kong Country for Nintendo. But in 2002, Microsoft bought up the company and prepared to have the studio start work on some of the marquee titles for their upcoming Xbox 360.
I told Kim that back before the Xbox 360 launched I had heard that Rare’s Perfect Dark Zero was meant to be the platform’s launch title, the reason gamers would take notice of the 360 and decide to buy into the new platform.
When the game finally hit, with the launch of the 360 and Rare’s other title Kameo, it was met with a mixed reception, certainly not the sort that Microsoft had bet on.
Is Rare, I asked Kim, a developer that better suited to the audience and platforms of Nintendo gaming?
