Viva Pinata for the xBox 360 {Retro Review}

I'm guessing most of you are probably familiar with Viva Pinata. It's a cute little game where you breed and raise animal shaped pinatas. You plants trees and flowers and care for your garden, which attracts various pinata breeds. You raise them and fatten them up to send them off to Pinata Central where they will be sent to fulfill birthday orders. Yeah, that's a bit of a wacky concept but really no stranger then say a plumber who rescues a princess by collecting mushrooms and jumping on turtle shells.

Now I have to admit for a wee bit I was addicted to this game, missing some much needed sleep in favour of playing it. However, that wore off pretty quickly. Within four or five days of playing the shine wore off and the ugly bits started to show through.

For one this game is BUGGY as all hell. I have had pumpkins that were planted too close to each other need to be watered non-stop for several in game days until I finally stopped watering them and they both died. I have had one of my little helper Gatherlings leave my employ after getting "stuck" on nothing.

It's also impossible to make an island. Once you have the dig pond feature available adding a nice island to your garden seems like the obvious choice. However the game can't handle it. I suppose if the island was smack dab in the centre of the garden it might work. But if it's along any edges then Seedos and the other NPC's wander on to it, get stuck and throw a fit. (Mind you all they have to do is back off the lot and enter somewhere else, but they can't figure that out). At least one pinata managed to make it out to my island, but then get stuck there and pine away. The game would try and set things right by constantly sending in Dastardos to throw dirt down in my pond. Highly annoying.

Another annoying feature is the item limit. When we first hit the limit for number of pinatas allowed in your garden (I think it's around twenty-ish), I was surprised and disappointed. However, I did adapt my game play to work around this. Getting rid of lower pinatas to lure in the newer ones. It almost added another level of skill to the game. So grudgingly I allowed that this limit was reasonable.

But then I hit the limit for over all items in the garden. Absolutely everything in the garden, every paving stone, every fence, each tree and flower, each piece of fruit, takes up slots and you are only allowed so many items. I was constantly hitting the max on this. It was extremely annoying! The part that really pissed me off was that even when my garden lot was expanded to the max size, the max item limit remained the same. Tiny beginner garden, max size garden, doesn't matter, still the same limit on items. So any cool design ideas you may have in mind, toss them out right now. They aren't going to work, not even once you've earned the biggest lot.

Overall Viva Pinata for the 360 had a lot of promise. It's quirky, with a cute style, but too many buggy or annoying features to make it worthwhile. All of this added up to me tossing this game aside to gather dust. Until recently, when my five year old daughter noticed it sitting on the shelf and asked to play. We blew off the dust and gave it a shot, but unfortunately my original opinion sticks. This game is fun for the first little while, then quickly becomes annoying.

I wonder if the sequel, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, is any better?  Have you played any of the Viva Pinata games? What did you think?