You start by meeting your navigator/guide, Dedos, a humanoid inhabitant who, like all the other young humanoids on the island, wears an imitation African mask. She guides you along the non-linear path to success. Other human types appear and form Seinfeld-like relationships, which tie into the TV show.
Just so you know, the game takes place on one side of the island and the TV show on another. Thus, the two are related and have cross-over, but they're not exact duplicates. Furthermore,
the show will hint at how to do things in the game, and the game will refer to the show, practically guaranteeing cross-over demand among young viewers/gamers.
So...how do you play? You start with a shovel from Dedos. Soon after you'll get seeds, a watering can, and you'll even get things such as upgrades to the shovel. The idea is to pat down the ground, "prepping" it for gardening. When you plant seeds and grass grows, you invite wild piñatas to visit. And if they like what they see and get what they need, they'll transform from "wild" to "resident" status (changing from black and white to color), and they'll stay in your garden. Your goal is to create the biggest, most populated garden possible, with all 62 piñatas living there peacefully and having offspring via stork express.
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You'll start by attracting a single worm, and then you might attract a second worm, after which you can introduce them to each other. If they like each other, they'll pair up and do a kind of mating dance (really), though just to be clear, piñatas don't make love. All piñata babies are literally brought by a stork. I know what you're thinking, and no I didn't make this up; really. This is Rare's new game. Anyway, each piñata pair has its own courtship dance, which we can say in front of a panel of our peers, is cute.
The ecosystem behind the game is clever, if not genius. After the worms come, attracting other animals occurs in a domino pattern. Birds are attracted to the baby worms, so they'll come as soon as that little thing starts to squirm. You can then plant a turnip to attract mice. Naturally, snakes like mice, so as soon as mice show up, snakes do too. The game is filled with piñata-like animals ranging from ponies, pigs, sheep, crocodiles, horses, hedgehogs, elephants and more.
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The game is apparently huge and can easily take between 20-40 hours, depending on how your garden grows. Microsoft plans on creating downloadable content, both free and paid for, with different kinds of animals appearing and attracting newer, exotic piñatas. Rare's title also has a diurnal/nocturnal cycle, so different creatures appear in the day than at night, and vice versa.
In all honesty, Viva Piñata is a huge surprise, though that's pretty obvious if you follow games. First, Rare really is creating a totally new intellectual property that's going to be both a game and a CG TV show. It's a reality. Second, the
demo we saw was primitive and early, but it also looked like an incredibly addictive game. Third, it looks deep and interesting, and despite a little hope that died inside me when I first saw it -- that somehow Rare would create the next Banjo Kazooie or Blast Corps 2, or who knows, the greatest game ever -- the more I watched the demo, the more impressed I was. Perhaps this really is Rare's true calling.
