Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise (Nintendo DS)

Real time strategy games have always had a special place in my heart, from way back playing the original Sim city on SNES I always liked the idea of become a god of sorts and taking control of peoples lives, so when Viva Piñata was released on the 360 my ears twitched a bit though it flew under my radar. Now however there is a portable version for Nintendo DS, but how does it play? Read on and find out.

For those of you who have never heard of Viva Piñata I will bring you up to speed, Viva Piñata is a game where you see yourself as a pseudo gardener/caretaker who has to simply look after the plants and Piñatas that live there, the Piñatas follow the American tradition of being animals filled with sweets but these Piñatas are alive and their one dream in life is to be sent to a children’s party and so forth.

This game pretty much completely relies on the touch screen for most of the controls with the face buttons simply used to move your view as you would with the directional keys on a keyboard in a PC RTS. One nifty thing I noted was the action buttons i.e. A, B etc also move the playing field making the game support left hand play which is a plus.

After you make your little profile you are presented with the tutorials, unlike most games where the tutorials are called tutorials and teach you in a very cold and somewhat inhuman fashion, Viva Piñata Pocket Paradise is different. With the game being targeted at a younger audience THQ and Rare have managed to revamp and make the somewhat tedious Tutorials interesting. By renaming them to episodes and adding FMVs depicting the Viva Piñata characters in somewhat relevant situations at the beginning of each tutorial they have managed to almost give the feel that you are about to sit down and watch a TV episode instead of a somewhat drawn out and boring tutorial.

The tutorials themselves are pretty standard fare which is a shame, I do like how which ever character is in the FMV is the character who will guide you through the tutorial and each are written differently and all have their own personalities, it’s the little touches that make all the difference. A small point I should make at this time is on the subject of text, the tutorials tell you everything in text form, why they don’t have it all voiced over, especially for it’s target audience I don’t know but I digress. My point is there is some text, no where near as bad as other games I’ve played but there is enough to frustrate some younger children who maybe can’t read too well and the text is critical to completing the tutorials which doesn’t help too much in that case.

Once you’ve finished the tutorials, which won’t take too long, you are then allowed to enter your garden and so the game begins. Your garden is a dump to begin with which means you’ll be spending the first ten minutes destroying junk, turning over soil and planting grass to lure Piñatas from the wild into your garden and hopefully make them residents. To get a piñata into your garden you have to fulfil a requirement be it a certain number of a particular piñata or a type plant, a piñata won’t even look twice at your garden if you don’t fulfil these requirements. Once you have the piñata in your garden keeping it there can sometimes be hit or miss in that if for example the requirement is to feed it a certain type of seed or fruit, the piñata will normally eat it right away and become a resident but if your quarry needs to say eat another piñata getting it to do that can be a long and tedious waiting game of trying to move your piñata in front of it purposely to start a conflict, which never works. All this requirement data along with the in game time is displayed at the top of the screen while you play the game on the bottom screen.