Be Excellent To Each Other

On September 5th Viva Pinata 2 is released.

Link included for easy ordering of game.

Also, bonus points for anyone with Viva Pinata 2 plux XBOX camera thingy.

So, who's gong to come and tiptoe around my garden?

I will once I play the first one. It's on my shelf but I haven't even touched it yet.

Hell yes. I think the missus would kill me if I didn't.

I don't know much about it though... new pinata? New what else? It's sort of come out of nowhere... and what does the camera do?

You can hold cards up to the camera to scan in animals, weather states, all such things.

You can actually make your own cards by taking in-game snaps and emailing them/uploading them for others.

I cannot find the fill explanation I was reading earlier on as I am in the middile of burning supper, but half an explanation here:
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/08/08/first ... -for-down/

I am most looking forward to finally being able to visit other people's gardens.

Hooray! It's a bit unfair this coming out just before Fallout 3, though... I picture a lot of bf/gf fighting over the 360.

Get jobs where you work opposite shifts.

I'll be getting this when I get back from the US.

We sort of do already... but I meant during those days when shifts sort of overlap. No doubt I'll be in the middle of infiltrating an Enclave base and she'll burst in from work and announce, "Right, you finished at 2pm, you've had four hours, now it's MY GO. Sit next to me and look stuff up on GameFAQs for me as I play."

Which is not at all how it was with the original, honest.

This. So very much this.

My missus did play it briefly, but when I saw she (well technically I, as I was signed in at the time) got 20g for merely naming one of the pinatas I did briefly question if the game was targetted at imbeciles. Since then I have heard good things about it, though.

If you want a game that is at all challenging, Viva Pinata isn't the right game.

I don't mind watching someone playing it.

Mr Dave: Apart from those bastard romance minigames. And the urge to smash to death your pinatas when they don't co-operate.

myoptika: T'was very wise of you to avoid saying that you think Fallout 3 is rubbish for the last five hours, as I would have come straight to Nottingham and thrown you in front of a tram.

VP2 needs to fix two things.

1. lose the item limits. Don't give me a big garden if I can't furnish it exactly the way I want.

2. improve the romancing mini-games.


oh and I'd appreciate it if they lost the 'play for 50 hours' achievement this time.

I played the original VP for a while but just stopped for no particular reason ages ago.

That's not quite true, because it depends on how you define 'challenging'. There are (in the first game) something over 50 species, I think) each with between 3-9 variations, some which will create hybrids or new species with the right conditions (involving locataion, seeds, foodstuffs, engineering ingredients into produce, etc). You also need to experiment a lot with the environment and crops grown to attract, sustain and breed these animals - they'll only breed once a very specific set of circumstances have been met. Trees will only reach full fruit if you learn where and how to plant them and fertilise them at specifically the right second, watching for the tiny, quick signs that it is ready for a growth spurt.

If you are trying to get the most out of your garden(s) then you have to experiment with all of these things, then you have to work out ways for pinatas to live together, as not all species will get along.

So it's a game of experiment and strategy, which is a challenge in itself. Though, if you mean it isn't challenging by way of button pressing and quick aiming - skill of the hand, I guess, then that is true enough.

A lot of the experimentation in Viva Pinata will require wasting hours and in-game money forcing each pinata (and they are uncooperative at the best of times) to eat every possible item to see if something happens.

Thank goodness for the ridiculously detailed FAQ that someone wrote, as even when you know which specific circumstances are needed, you'll still spend a lot of time accomplishing them. And this is before you take into account the constant interruptions from things like pinatas fighting, the ruffian characters who burst into your garden to break fences and barf soil into your carefully constructed ponds, pinata getting sick, pinata you don't want coming in to eat pinata you do want, tending your garden, and more.

I mean, I really really enjoyed the game, but I can't honestly think how you were supposed to figure half of the stuff out. Would anyone here have honestly realized that to get the Pigxie you had to romance a pig with a swan, in the mysterious (read: otherwise useless) house that became available for construction? Or to get a Lackatoad you had to let a Lickatoad eat a nightshade berry and then immediately whack it with the shovel to make it spit it out? Leafos telling you OUTRIGHT LIES about how things (didn't) work didn't help.

Things I'd like to see fixed:
-helpful helpers, especially the Gatherlings. Perhaps the ability to 'tag' which trees or areas they collect stuff from... so the bait you've left out to entice a particular pinata in doesn't get gathered and sold while the valuable acorns around your oak tree sit ignored and rotting.
-the ability to smash the hell out of the annoying Ruffians. When you've got four or five species in your garden, and are trying to entice water species in, to have an invincible character rampage through and completely ruin your pond is frankly the developers spitting in your eye and telling you they hate you. Yes, I know the cutlass eventually stops them, but not until late in the game.
-secure storage - fences and gates just don't keep enough stuff out, which is a huge problem when you're trying to tinker toadstools into mushrooms and your idiot pinatas make straight for them and poison themselves.
-better landscaping... hell, a bigger garden. Some of the house 'boxes' when you're placing them were huge, but the building itself that resulted wasn't.
-faster entry/exit from houses. The Salamangos in particular took an ice age or two to slowly waddle up the ramp into their house.
-more attentive pinata. You're trying to feed something to one of your own, and as soon as you move the cursor away it buggers off into its house. Likewise, sort the AI out for wild pinata that are looking around your garden. Kate spent hours swearing and shouting at the swans, chasing them around with the sandwiches but was unable to get them to eat (even though all their other requirements were met)
-fewer petty annoyances, like trying to select pinata in flight (impossible), sitting around watching trees for the next cue to apply fertilizer, having to tap out all the hard soil at the beginning, the ridiculous controls for putting things into crates...
-the ability to kill Leafos with the shovel, and cut her head off.

Time Consuming != Challenging.

If you want to get the most out of your garden, then you pretty much have to clear out all previous species anyway or start a new one, due to limits on the amount of Pinata you can keep.

And you can look in the journal for instructions of how to attract pinata. The only thing it doesn't tell you is how to get them to your borders, if I remember correctly, but once they're there, it'll tell you how to get them into your garden, and once there, it'll tell you how to make them resident, and once resident, it'll tell you how to breed them. It'll miss out only a few things, like how to breed two/four headed snakes.

And Not Challenging doesn't mean not good. If was a reply to the comment about an award being given for naming a pinata. As in if you want more challenge than that, you're not going to find it here.

That's not quite true, either. A higher value (an some kind of in-game achievement) is awarded for you breeding the varieties of animals - not the very rare two-headed/four-headed snakes, or the swan/pig hybrid, but colour variations, etc. This isn't covered in the journal, either, it's just through experimentation that you can find out what brings about these changes, and that's another part of the challenge.



That's just not the case. Naming a pinata is just a lead in to the game and not in any way the standard of what is 'challenging' in the game - many games have this - You get an achievement in Liberty City simply for arriving and getting in a car, but that doesn't mean that's the pinnacle of difficulty. The thing is, there is no definitive or prescribed narrative in this game - it is difficult to do things 'wrong', but that doesn't mean that the game is without challenge. Try and breed every variant of every pinata and then say that it isn't challenging, because you have to be imaginative and try to think what might prompt specific behavior in the pinata.

I do understand what you are saying, but I disagree with you, because I think you are confusing what is a challenge and what requires dexterity, timing or other such motor skills, whereas any strategy based game has a whole different level of challenge itself.

There was no suggestion that I thought that not very challenging = not very good, by the way, just that I think you are perhaps missing out on something if you think that 'if you want something more challenging than naming a pinata, then you won't find it here' is totally incorrect.

I don't really regard feeding your pinata just about everything you can find as in any way challenging. And that's generally all you need to do to get different variations on your pinata. And as for breeding the snakes, that's arbitrary, not challenging.

Put basically, it's almost impossible to do badly in VP. Therefore it's not at all challenging. Anything you need to do is just a case of time than anything.

Oh no!

Sudden realisation of the fact that Viva Pinata II and Spore are due out on the same day has just struck me



Fire up the time machine, Jeeves, for surely there will nt be enough hours in that day...

Clone additional Mimis and purchase more game computing devices.

Well, I have Spore arriving for the mac, and Pinata for the 360, but they are at opposite ends of the room. Mimi clones are beyond my pocket money at the moment, what with gaming super friday around the corner, so I am going to have to simply fashion a pair of extend-o-arms from coat-hangers and cardboard inner tubes. But which screen do I look at without risking neck RSI? I shall have to fashion a cunning system of mirrors so I can look at both screens at once...

Perhaps some sort of VGA box to allow you to switch between both the 360 and the computer is in order?

Of course, one will absorb you for too long, and you'll toggle back to VP to find all your pinata dying of sour candy and your garden on fire, and then you'll toggle back to Spore to find your little tribe has been eaten by something with 7 legs and 3 eyes.

It's-the-internet FTFY.

I'm thinking I *shouldn't* buy this when it comes out, as otherwise Kate will never find herself a new job. But she will have a brilliant garden full of 'fudgetables' as she calls pinata.

I'm starting to get really excited about this now.

One week today!

Hopefully the co-op will be great.

I worry it will be 'You hold my spade while I plant these seeds'.

So, do we get to design our own avatars or something so we can be seen walking around?

Honestly, the only thing I've seen of this game is the stupid flash banner (Pester pointing at how horstachio + sour candy = dead horstachio. In all honestly, I don't give a toss about the whole story line and honestly wish the whole 'Pester is a griefer ffs' thing was left out) and the picture on Inside Xbox.

Hell, that picture (of a crab and camel, sounds like a good pub!) inspired a LOT of discussion betwixt Kate and myself last night over what animals they could add (as again, we haven't seen anything else so don't know if any have been revealed). Naturally, we just want tapirs and we'll be happy.

We were also debating what the super-secret bonus creature would be if there was one... and decided on a dinosaur, though I thought perhaps a Loch Ness monster would be good too.

BELIEVE

I hope the co-op is good, though to be honest I'd be happy just to be able to go and mooch around someone's garden to see what they've done and what animals they have. Only one week! Woooooo

Rare in not planning on fleecing gamers shocker!


Follow the link for gratuitous use of the phrase "vinegar strokes".

But doesn't it want you to buy cards that you hold up to the camera to unlock new animals? Because that sounds like fleecing to me.

(I've got the first game cheap but it's scratched so I'm waiting to the fall update to hope that makes it work better).

Nope - cards are free - you can create your own in-game by taking snapshots or download them from t'internet, etcetera.

Oh. Wow. I just assumed.

Yeay!

Important breaking development

I have burned my thumb on my right hand - my gaming thumb!

Two days before Viva Pinata release! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Eurogamer give Viva Pinata DS a very good review. Quite tempted actually.

I actually have the first DS game, but the disk is pretty scratched and so it plays very slowly, and keeps hanging. I'm planning on giving it a shot again when I can install it to my HD.

I just pre-ordered this yesterday. Damn your infectious... things... Mimi.

Thumb is healing, thumb is healing!

I am confident that my thumb will be able to make it through!



The DS version does indeed look great, also - I am impressed at how much content they appear to have been able to transport over from the original 360 title.

I am confident that it is going to be ace.

Haha! Awesomes.

Oh, I'm glad you like him! I had a 2% worrying doubt you'd be angry, but was 98% hopefully he'd make you smile.

How could anyone be angry with you Meems? Seriously!?

Awwwww

*nuzzles Dimrill*

If you are going to "cyber" get a room.

But seriously: If we are talking about people animating the work of Dimrill then I've got something in the pipeline that is acebest.

Oh lordy.

I'm still in two minds about getting this right away, to be honest.

I shall contact Mrs Metal and tell her to put the stragling glosev on.