Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise
Developer(s)	Rare
Publisher(s)	Microsoft Game Studios
Producer(s)	Steven Brand Adam Park
Designer(s)	Justin Cook
Composer(s)	Grant Kirkhope
Series	Viva Piñata
Platform(s)	Xbox 360
Release date(s)	NA September 2, 2008 EU September 5, 2008 AU September 11, 2008
Genre(s)	Life simulation game
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is a life simulation game developed by Rare and published by Microsoft Studios for the Xbox 360. It was first released in North America on September 2, 2008, soon after in Europe and Australia. It is the third installment in the Viva Piñata series, and the sequel to 2006's Viva Piñata. In the game, players assume the role a gardener who must tend to their garden and attract various piñata-like animals to live in their garden. New gameplay elements include two additional biomes to catch piñatas, as well as online co-operative play.

Development of the game stemmed from the numerous features that had to be cut for the release of Viva Piñata due to time constraints. While the original intent was to implement these features through downloadable content, Rare opted to instead create a sequel, as the company believed that the downloadable content would not have interacted well with the main game and thus, lessen the experience for the player. Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise uses many of the same assets found in its predecessor, and was developed around the idea of "add more content, but don't remove any content".

The game received positive reviews from critics, with praise directed towards the addictive gameplay, and the minor improvements made to the user interface. The game was however, not commercially successful, and was later nominated by GameSpot for the "Best Game No One Played" award during their year-end awards ceremony. It was offered for free as part of Games with Gold for the Xbox 360 console between November 1, 2014 and November 15, 2014.^[1] The game is also included in the Rare Replay video game compilation, released for the Xbox One in 2015.

Plot

The second Viva Piñata game for the Xbox 360 invites gamers to return to the magical Piñata Island to continue their job as a gardener and to make yet another garden for the island. Unfortunately, not all is well on the island, as Professor Pester and his gang of Ruffians have wiped out Piñata Central’s computer records while attempting to steal the information contained within to overrule the entire island, thus stopping all parties' Pinata deliveries. As a result, all knowledge about piñata species and which piñatas are needed for which parties has been lost, leading to chaos and the slow stop of the island's way of manner. The player is tasked with assisting Piñata Central in rebuilding the database, achieved by enticing specific piñatas to inhabit the garden, filling them with candy, and sending them off to parties around the world and saving the entire partying world.

Gameplay

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is a life simulation game, and retains almost all of the gameplay elements from its predecessor. As before, the game is primarily a sandbox title, with players maintaining a garden plot which they can decorate and customize as they see fit. The primary residents of these gardens are living piñata animals who wander the area, eating, sleeping, and even mating with each other. By fulfilling conditions favorable to specific piñata species, players attract members of those species to the garden. In general, the larger and more exotic an animal, the more difficult it is to attract.

In order to give players more choices about how to play the game, the sequel now includes multiple modes:^[2]

• Standard Mode - The primary game mode, which includes challenges from sour piñatas, Ruffians, and other forces.
• Just For Fun Mode - A mode where players can hop in and immediately begin working on a garden without worrying about running out of money or having to unlock various items. However, certain more exotic piñatas are not available in this mode, nor are Xbox Live Achievements.
• Contests - Players can enter their piñatas in beauty contests and races, the latter of which requires piñatas to race along a course collecting sweets and avoiding loathers (Pester's evil red bombs).

In addition to the roughly 60 unique piñatas from the previous title, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise adds 28 new animals to the mix (26 tame, 9 sour), raising the total number (of which some are not fully distinct) to over 81.^[3]

A number of the new species are specifically designed to inhabit the title's two new areas: the cool, icy Piñarctic and the warm, arid Dessert Desert. These areas are not part of the main garden, but rather can be visited for the purpose of capturing piñatas. This is done by baiting purchased traps with items which each species is attracted to, and then shipping any successfully captured piñata back to the player's garden.^[4]

Rare indicated that, with the sequel, they have "perfected the food chain", increasing the variety of items which piñatas will eat and the results which will occur when they do.^[5] This is intended to reduce the repetitive "instruct each piñata to eat every possible item" activity which was sometimes required in the earlier title. Depending on the piñata, consuming a given item may increase or decrease its "candiosity", or can even lead to the piñata performing a trick. When this occurs, players can quickly use the new "trick stick", which causes the piñata to learn the trick permanently so that it can be performed later on request. Other enhancements which improve the core game experience include the ability to cycle through garden residents using the bumpers, as well as quick access to seeds and fertilizer without requiring a separate trip through the menu and Costolot's store.^[6]

Garden

While the size of the in-game garden is not any larger than in the previous title, the numbers of items which can be placed in the garden simultaneously has been substantially increased.^[7] Players can move the cursor slightly farther outside the confines of the garden in order to view things occurring around the edges, particularly to view visiting animals who have not yet become residents.^[4]

Numerous new items and interactive objects are available as well, including toys for the piñatas to play with. Players eventually gain access to ice and sand terrain types, allowing them to provide "homes away from home" for any piñatas captured from remote environments. The water and weather effects have also been improved, whereas in the original game the rain would just hit the screen and fade away, now it is able to run down the screen, also when the snow surface is placed and the cursor is on it the rain will become snow. These same water and rain enhancements also appear in a more recent Rare title, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Co-operative play

Two gardeners at work

While the original Viva Piñata had a primitive system where two players could mutually control the single game cursor using different controllers, the sequel adds full drop-in/drop-out offline gameplay for two players and online co-operative gameplay for up to four players. This allows additional gardeners (with their own cursor) to join the game at any time to assist the primary player with gardening tasks. To encourage players to assist each other, the other players have immediate access to fully upgraded tools, as well as all actions and activities.^[8]

Xbox Live Vision support

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise makes unique use of the optional Xbox Live Vision camera accessory through a feature entitled Piñata Vision.^[9] In a manner similar to what is done in titles such as The Eye of Judgment, the camera is able to optically scan an image from a card and use the embedded matrix barcode to allow in-game content to be imported or activated.

The images themselves do not have to be purchased, and instead are primarily downloaded from the game's website. Players can also make use of an in-game virtual photo mode that allows piñatas in the garden to be photographed and their data uploaded. Other players can then download these piñatas in Piñata Vision form for use in their own garden.

Development

As Rare released the original Viva Piñata for the Xbox 360 in 2006, its development team saw it as incomplete. The developers had cut partial ideas from the release in order to meet their deadlines.^[10] Rare's Gregg Mayles said that the game sold well and steadily on par with their expectations^[11] and Xbox's Phil Spencer added that the game was considered a success inside the company.^[12] The team incorporated player feedback and worked towards a "more definitive version" of the original.^[10] Mayles left the team to work on Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and Justin Cook became the team's lead designer.^[13] The sequel was built atop the original and the developers re-used many of the tools from the original game's development.^[14] In both the sequel and the original, the development team volunteered to record the sounds used for the piñatas.^[14] One of the team's new ideas was "Piñata Vision", a feature that detects printed cards via the Xbox camera to change the in-game environment (e.g, adding piñatas or altering the weather).^[13] Near the time of the sequel's release, Rare's Mayles figured that the team would likely not have enough new gameplay ideas to warrant a sequel to Trouble in Paradise,^[10] though Cook said that he would work on the game's shop interface had he more time.^[15] The games were later re-released on the 2015 compilation of Rare games, Rare Replay,^[16] but the server that handled their piñata sharing features had been shut down by that time.^[17]

When asked about the origins of the Viva Piñata sequel, lead designer Justin Cook responded, "The team wanted to make a sequel and Microsoft could see there was an opportunity to build on something unique to their platform".^[18]

When discussing the improvements in the new title, Cook stressed that in addition to just adding "new stuff", a key goal included making the game more accessible to new players with the "Just For Fun" mode. Cook went on to explain his own take on the new features, "For me the biggest 'feature' is the improved player experience. This time you can do what you want much more easily (as long as the piñata will let you) and I'm afraid that means you're going to find it even harder to tear yourself away from the screen".^[18] Another improvement considered by Rare was to have Nintendo DS and Xbox 360 compatibility.^[19]

Reception

Reception
Aggregate scores Aggregator Score GameRankings 82%[20] Metacritic 82/100[21] Review scores Publication Score 1UP.com A[22] Eurogamer 8/10[23][24] Game Informer 8.25/10[25] GameSpot 8.5/10[6] GameSpy [26][27] GamesRadar [28] GameTrailers 8.1/10[29] IGN 8.5/10[30][31] OXM 6.5/10[32] VideoGamer.com 9/10[33][34]

Viva Piñata Trouble in Paradise received positive reviews, with an average score of 82% on review aggregate sites Metacritic and GameRankings.^[20][21] including several "Editor's Choice" awards from reviewers. In general, the improvements to the user interface and addition of co-operative play were highlighted, while the most commonly cited negative was limited innovation in the core gameplay.

The multiplayer aspects received mixed reception. Tom Orry of VideoGamer.com was critical of the online co-op, calling it "nothing more than a rather high-tech show and tell".^[34] Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer criticized the lack of an in-game avatar during co-op, citing that it "lessens the feeling of connection with other players," and also mentioned that "perhaps a co-operative system where players created discrete gardens and allowed them to cross-pollinate organically, like Spore or Animal Crossing, would have been preferable."^[24] GameSpot's Tom McShea said that the multiplayer was "unfulfilling no matter which side you're on...it feels funny having other people messing around with shovels and bags of seeds, tweaking your finely tuned habitat. Visiting someone else's garden is just as unsettling. It's not your world, after all, so you're left doing the tasks assigned to you without being able to exert the creativity and vision that you would be able to unleash in your own garden".^[6] However, Andrew Reiner of Game Informer praised the online co-op, calling it "an amazing shared experience that pushes players to coordinate their efforts".^[25]

GameSpot scored the title 8.5/10, praising the greater variety of gameplay, but criticizing the voice acting.^[6] The review highlighted the party/celebration challenge system which encourages players to acquire different piñatas, providing goal-oriented motivation lacking in the previous title. IGN also rated the game an 8.5/10 (the same score awarded to the original and to Pocket Paradise), indicating that is worth buying if one enjoyed the original and wanted to make use of the co-op features. However, the reviewer did note that the game hasn't radically changed from its predecessor, primarily providing more of the same. The GameSpy review commented favorably on the streamlined user interface and more user-friendly experience, while remarking that it was still a pain to have to wade through several levels of menus for some actions.^[26] Despite any such criticisms, the title still received a score of 4.5/5, along with an "Editor's Choice" award.

The harshest critique came from the Official Xbox Magazine, which described frustration at being unable to effectively control the garden's residents as well as frequent interference from destructive intruders.^[35] This, coupled with continuing issues running out of space within the garden, resulted in a score of 6.5/10. The review concludes, "Even if there were room to experiment, a few dozen animals aren’t sufficient to lure back veteran gardeners for long, and newcomers are bound to wonder why life on the island is so needlessly difficult".

Nonetheless, the 1UP.com review captured the general sentiment of the majority of reviewers by summarizing, "If you hated the original, Trouble in Paradise isn't going to change your opinion. If, however, you somehow missed out completely on the piñata party the first time around, I implore you to check it out now -- it's certainly much deeper and more addictive than its playful visuals would lead you to believe".^[22]

Despite favorable reviews, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise sold poorly, much like its predeccesor, peaking at only number 23 on the UK Entertainment Software Chart^[36] During GameSpot's 2008 Awards ceremony, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise was nominated for "Best Game No One Played".^[37]

References

External links

• Official website