The Second Best Game This Year With 'Paradise' in the Title.

By Shaunage October 12, 2008 1 Comments

The original Viva Pinata kind of came out of nowhere for me. I'd seen gameplay footage

and heard from people who were really liking it but the term 'Romance Dance' was then and remains so unappealing that I didn't want to hear about the game at all. I still don't really know why I bought it. I randomly walked into Kmart one day and saw it there for $60 - half of the price of a regular game. I remembered the strong reviews it was getting and on a whim picked it up. When told at the desk the game was actually selling for $50, I picked up a copy for a friend as well. While I can't explain why I did this, it turned out to be the right decision and I found the original Viva Pinata to be one of the best games available for the 360. The checklists in the journal give it an amazing, but well hidden sense of structure and it ends up playing very similarly to the collecting aspects of the Pokemon games. I put a full 50 hours into the original game, collected my 1000 points and immediately wished there was a sequel.

After a misstep with the heart breaking release of a trashy party game, here is that sequel. It looks and plays identically to the first game but has about 50% more pinatas to collect, a kind of mission mode, where you are asked to aquire a very specific pinata to send to a party, giving the game more of a sense of progression, and quicker shortcuts to most of the stuff you use the most often. This is EXACTLY, down to the letter, the game I wanted. It doesn't bother me that all of the shop owner voice bits are the EXACT same ones used in the first game, because it's now so rare to have to actually visit them. If I want to nitpick, I'd have to say that the pop up menu to get seeds etc is probably still a bit too slow, since it loads all of the icons. A further improvement would be to just pop up a list with no pictures at all. Just make the game run that little bit smoother. One of the very few complaints I had with the original game was the general pathing and behaviour of the pinatas. Of special note in the pathing was trying to romance Salamangoes. The path up to their house was so long that they would (more than 90% of the time) give up or get stuck or similar. It was a nightmare. I bred them in VP2 with no such troubles. The visiting pinatas in the original game were also only very vaguely interested in coming there to live and they would often come in and wander around for ages without eating any of the thousands of apples/whatever you had left lying around to fill in their resident requirements. The most memorable of these was the Elephanilla, which needs to eat something along the lines of 16 apples, 16 bananas and a sandwich before it will stay. I had to trap one with fences to stop it from leaving after eating only one or two things. VP2 fixes both of these issues. Any pinata wandering in will generally run immediately towards its requirements and start eating and will not leave until it is finished. The ridiculous requirements were also lowered, in this case from 16 apples etc down to just four.

The first VP had an excellent set of achievements with 50 of them, each worth exactly 20 points. The only other game I know to have done this is Dead Rising, in which it is equally commendable. While VP2 strays from this, with some worth 50 and a lot worth less, it does do something fairly interesting with its points. Every single achievement in the game is based around a feature not present in the original game. This means there isn't a single achievement shared by both games and is an excellent way to showcase the new additions to the game. The quality of these additions does, however, vary wildly. The arctic and desert locations are good, though it would be nice to have ten or more of these themed locations. The challenges system as I said adds a great sense of progression to the game, but I think in some ways this detracts from the experience. The pinata fashion shows and races, on the other hand, are so bad that they detract from the overall quality of the game as a complete package. They seem badly out of place. Of particular offense are the Pinata Vision achievements, requiring you to own or in my case borrow a Vision Camera and find cards on the internet to scan into your game. It took me 45 minutes to get the lighting and positioning just right for this feature to work even once (the achievement is for doing it ten times). Better than R6 Vegas, I guess, since I NEVER got that one to work. The only achievement I don't have now is the "Play with 4 players online for an hour" one, as there just aren't any 4 player games running online and no one is joining mine. I've given up on social engineering to get achievements, gathering a group of people on a message board for a good old achievement whoring session has really gotten old now, so I'll just have to look at my 990 in VP2 for all eternity. Unless... you know... 3 people read this and want to help...

In the early stages of the game, since it was doing everything I wanted and I hadn't found any of the worse features yet, I could be heard to call Trouble in Paradise "The Best Sequel I Have Ever Played." Not the best game to be the second or later release in a franchise, mind you. I'm talking about the sequel which most closely matched what I wanted it to be. Having done what I'm going to count as completing the game, I have to say that the experience did start to lessen later on, but on the whole I had a very VERY positive experience with Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise and I applaud Rare for releasing it. Also the name 'Sarsgorilla'. Well done.

For reference the title refers to Burnout and the two games are dangerously close in quality. The number of excellent games released so far and indeed about to be released this year is absolutely insane.

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