E3 06: Viva Piñata Impressions

LOS ANGELES--Rare's upcoming Xbox 360 game Viva Piñata is being shown behind closed doors at E3 this week, and we were fortunate enough to spend some time with the game earlier today. Although we weren't allowed to get our hands on the controller, the Rare representatives presenting the game did a great job of talking us through and showing off many of the game's features.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Viva Piñata's unusual premise, the game will task you with constructing and maintaining a garden so beautiful that any wild piñata who wander past it will feel compelled to pop in and take a look and, if your garden is to their liking, decide to make it their home. There are around 60 different species of piñata in the game, each with its own needs, so the real challenge will be to attract as many of them as possible to your garden oasis and then keep them all happy. Piñata worms, for example, need nothing more than a patch of earth to keep them smiling, while rabbits have a penchant for long grass and carrots. You'll also be able to erect special habitats for every species in the game, although doing so won't be cheap.

The garden that we were shown during today's presentation was already very well established and was apparently the result of some 15 to 20 hours of play. The garden's residents included worms, raccoons, pigs, a horse, and a large bear that the garden's owner had chosen to accessorize with a backpack, a pair of shades, a mohawk, and a fake mustache. Many of the piñata were enclosed in pens that had been constructed using various fence types, not to stop them from escaping, but to keep them safe from potential predators, such as piñata wolves and crocodiles. If one of the predators had a mind to, there's a good chance that it would be able to break through the aforementioned fencing, which is why you'll have the option to use stronger (and more expensive) stone walls if you feel it's necessary.

If you want predatory piñata in your garden, of course, then you'll have to satisfy their appetites to keep them happy, which will invariably mean sacrificing some of your smaller creatures. Fortunately, it'll be possible for you to breed the sexless piñatas, provided you have two of the same species that are happy. So there's no reason why you couldn't have all of the species in the game coexisting in one garden, as long as you keep a close eye on every link in the piñata food chain. Each species of piñata will have a different mating ritual that takes the form of a minigame. The one that we got to take a look at was for the worms, and it required the player to do nothing more than guide one of the parents-to-be through an S-shaped tunnel so that it could meet up with its partner. Moments later, we were treated to a brief movie of the two worms dancing in front of a jukebox inside a room filled with heart-shaped balloons, and before we could pose the question "How do asexual piñata worms do it anyway?" we realized that the Xbox 360 console in front of us was responsible for a tiny little miracle of life.

In addition to piñata predators, you'll need to keep an eye out for especially naughty piñatas known as sours. These red-and-black creatures are filled with bad candy and will invariably cause trouble if they get into your garden. Helpers that you can hire to assist with the running of your garden (by watering plants for you, for example) can be told to beat the sours with a stick, but doing so will cause all of the bad candy to spill out into your garden, where it'll prove poisonous to any piñata who eat it. Ideally, you'll want to tame the wild piñata by figuring out what makes them happy and giving to them in abundance. Sours that are tamed will lose their evil-looking colors and their bad habits will be reversed, so a sour raccoon that steals stuff from your garden might start bringing items into the garden once it has been tamed, for example.

Another way to rid your garden of troublesome sours will be to stick them in crates and ship them off to unwitting friends who have no idea what's inside your gift to them until they open it. The sending of gifts between players across Xbox live (with accompanying notes) is intended to be used nicely, of course, but there'll be nothing to stop you from sending unwanted pests to other gardens. Be warned though, that every piñata in the game has a tag (or label) attached to it that contains information on its origins and such, so there's no chance of friends that you share your sours with forgetting who did it to them.

If you need to appease a friend that you've upset, or simply need something to beautify your garden with, you might want to pay a visit to the in-game store, where you can buy and sell just about any object in the game in exchange for chocolate coins. Unless we horribly misunderstood what was said during our presentation, you'll also be able to purchase the game's chocolate currency on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Further information on Viva Piñata is scarce at present, save for the fact that the game will boast changing weather, a simple day-and-night cycle (some piñata are nocturnal), and menus and controls that promise to make the game accessible to even the youngest of players. We look forward to bringing you more coverage of Viva Piñata in the coming weeks and months.