Viva Pinata

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $28.78

Features:

• Create your own garden and more than 60 types of piñatas
• Use easy, basic tools to develop an enviroment that reflects you
• Regardless of skill level, find challenge in keeping out sour piñatas, perfecting your garden and keeping your new piñata friends happy
• Choose how much you want to control your piñatas by letting them run free or attempting to control their daily lives
• Games for Windows Version

Customer Reviews:

One of the best I've played in years [Posted on 2007-11-19]
The most oft-repeated phrase in any review for "Viva Pinata" is that it's "not just for kids." This is not without good reason. While the packaging and overall feel of the game is as bright and shiny as a candied marble and is specifically designed to draw kids in, the gameply is consistently entertaining and is challenging enough to daunt any experienced adult gamer...

I'd even go so far as to say that this is one of the most original and interesting games to come along in years. It's rare that I become so engrossed in what's going on in a given game that hours pass, seemingly, with speed of a blink of an eye- but such has been the case, since I installed Viva Pinata.

Now- a word of caution: I'm running the game on a dual 3.1 GHZ system with a Radeon 512 MB 3d accellerator, and the game automatically put my graphic preferences at the lowest level, when I started it up. I manually changed things to medium, which resulted in a very pleasing improvement in graphics. However, my system now routinely ratchets up to overdrive, during play. One can only assume that you need a pretty hot system to view the game in its full glory. That having been said, the game plays smoothly as silk, and lacks the lags during autosave that have been a bane to Xbox gamers.

In closing, I heartily reccommend VP. To those gamers who reject this game because of the "cute factor," I can only say:

It must suck to be you...

Innovative and refreshing. [Posted on 2007-12-06]
I didn't imagine that what my friends were labeling "that cool pinata game" was actually an engrossing habitat simulation. You can garden, landscape, breed animals -- er..pinatas. And they're all named after sweets! There is nothing more rewarding than attracting that long sought after animal to your garden.

The game is so lighthearted and dreamlike. Even death is given light treatment -- the creatures don't "die", but are busted, leaving their candy "essence" behind. Every creature has a unique house. They're all so creatively constructed that you'll find yourself buying every building just to see what they look like. What's even more fun is trying to figure out some of the more obscure food references. "Swanana" shouldn't leave you wondering for too long. ^_-

I'd recommend this game to any one of any age.

System Requirements! [Posted on 2007-12-27]
Watch out for the system requirements on this one. I installed the game only to find out it would not run on my computer (which is only two years old). It needs 10GB of free hard drive spaced and a pretty heavy duty video card, both of which I can not afford. Unfortunately I am now left with an opened Viva Pinata game that I can not use.

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