So, after praying fervently and consulting sheep's entrails, I finally decided to buy an Xbox 360. That monumental decision made, I was then faced with the even more agonizing choice of what game to buy with it. Being the poor sod that I am [Mike spends all of the millions we pay him here on supporting the spread of democratic propaganda in the Middle East - ed.] , one $60 game with my $400 system was about my limit. Facing the game case at my local Target, two adjacent games stared back at me. To my left was Gears of War, the violent, bloody, and critically acclaimed shooter, a game in which you engage twisted monsters in an epic battle to decide the fate of humanity. To my right was Viva Piñata, a game where you grow a garden and raise cute little animals filled with candy. I did the right thing.

   So I got home and immediately fired that bad boy up. However, as brilliantly colored creatures capered across my screen like the critters in recent CG children's movies and sang about how they were, "filled with fun," I rued my decision like an incontinent man rues entering a lemonade chugging contest. Seconds before I bit down on the cyanide capsule, though, the cringe-worthy cutscene ended. And when the game proper began I was swept up into a bizarre but surprisingly endearing world that was one-part children's fable and two parts Discovery Channel nature documentary.

I'd kill for some candy

   The game starts with the player arriving at a patch of dry, dirty ground where a young girl is crying. The young girl (Leafos!) informs you that the ground on which you stand was once a glorious garden where all sorts of wild piñatas thrived. Only you can restore it to its former glory. Also fight forest fires.

   Things begin simply, with you clearing away all the garbage, planting some grass (the kind that grows on lawns, Mr. Tokey), and cultivating a few bits of vegetation. But soon the piñatas will come and the real work will begin. You see, on Piñata Island, instead of your typical fauna, the animal species are all types of sentient piñatas. Sure, they might be shaped like sparrows, alligators, and fluffy little bunnies, but the neon colors and tissue-paper fur are dead giveaways. Yeah, I know. Weird.

   That being said, the goal of the game, not to mention the only way you can truly restore beauty to this desolate chunk of Piñata Island, is to get your grubby little mitts on as many different kinds of piñatas as possible. The only way to do that, aside from staging daring daylight raids on iParty, is to entice them into making their permanent residences in your garden. Every piñata has a set of conditions that must be met before it will wander into your garden. For the lowly piñatas like the worm and the sparrow these conditions are pretty simple. Plant some grass, grow a vegetable or two, go a day without picking your nose, etc. However, as the game progresses these conditions will become increasingly tricky to meet. Some of the later ones involve growing a number of very rare plants or acquiring large amounts of other hard-to-find piñatas to feed to the new guy. [One piñata even kept demanding that I transfer $63.50 to her Paypal account - ed.] But, hey, life is full of challenges. For me, it's trying to have a conversation with a beautiful woman without uttering the phrase, "butt cheek." I haven't had any luck so far, but someday...

The trials continue

Hot piñata on piñata action!

   While much of this strange game reeks of wacky tobacco abuse, I think the piñata mating was by far the weirdest part. Perhaps some of you have seen the Patton Oswalt comedy bit where he talks about how censor-approved euphemisms for curse words often sound much nastier than the words that they are used in place of? Well, that's kind of how I felt about this mating stuff. There is no frank talk about piñatas being in heat or the piñata female presenting herself to the male (heck, there aren't even any piñata genders, but that's a whole other can of piñata worms!), and there certainly aren't any images of the piñatas going at it with the kind of detached ferocity that animals are wont to do. Instead you must, "romance," the piñatas by feeding them specific food or building them a house in your garden. Maybe playing a little piñata-Barry White would help too.

   Once the piñatas have been adequately romanced, little hearts will start to appear over their heads and you can direct them towards one another. After completing a kind of irritating mini-game, the two lovebirds will disappear into the piñata house you've built for them and a short cutscene will play where they do a romance dance. At first these all seem sort of cute and innocuous, but when you start to consider the soft, pink lighting and the rather suggestive moves some of the piñatas perform, it can get very disturbing [I just got an unexplainable urge to put on a pair of rubber gloves - ed.]. It really does seem that if the game had just been straight about what was going on instead of resorting to strange euphemisms, the whole thing would have seemed a lot less creepy.

   On a similar theme, sometimes certain piñatas just won't get along (or one of them will get the piñata munchies for a buddy) and there'll be a piñata rumble in the piñata Bronx. Unlike real animal fights where the critters tear the bejeeziz out of each other, piñatas fight by hurling strange flaming projectiles. Again, I don't know about you, but seeing a little piñata gopher whipping burning tires at a fellow piñata is much more jarring then just seeing them slap each other around. When a piñata is killed, he explodes in a shower of confetti and candy. Abandoning any pretenses of camaraderie, all nearby piñatas rush towards the remains of their slain comrade and begin consuming the scattered candy. While there isn't anything even remotely resembling gore, something about the affair still seemed incredibly gruesome. [Way to slip cannibalism under the ESRB, people! - ed.]

Paint me pink and beat me with a stick

   Aesthetically, Viva Piñata does next-gen graphics right. Everything on Piñata Island is bright, colorful, and depicted in a cartoony style that fits perfectly with the game's whimsical tone. Part of the reason building up your garden is such a blast is because everything you plop down in it is always so pleasing to look at. The piñatas themselves are absolutely gorgeous. Zooming the camera in on a particular critter and simply watching the fluidity of its movement as it shuffled about sniffing and pawing at things, I was truly impressed by not only the detail on the creature itself (you could see the individual strands of tissue paper on its piñata body), but also the detail that went into its intricate animation. This truly is a beautiful game to watch. For all of you piñata perverts out there, heaven has come early.

   Sound wise things are a bit more subtle. There is music, but most of the stuff that plays during gameplay is very subdued and generally fades into the background as you garden. The sound effects, though, particularly those that emanate from your piñatas, are much more prominent and feel spot on. Whether chirps, growls, shrieks, or hisses, each sounded appropriate for the creature that was making it. And if you can manage to ignore the anguished whimpers of one of your sick piñatas, you are truly a soulless bastard deserving of nothing but our unmitigated scorn [well, that and perhaps a full spoonful of that "bound, whipped and gagged" Mexican hot sauce I have on my shelf - ed.] . The voice acting, too, sounded very professional, with most of the characters having goofy or cutesy voices in the way most children's cartoon characters are wont to do. Thankfully, though, they never pushed it to the point of being irritating or cloying.

What do you give to the person who has everything? More.

   Really, the only thing this game lacks is more space. As expansive as your garden eventually becomes, it's nowhere near the size it needs to be to accommodate all the critters and clutter you'll accumulate. You'll frequently need to purge large swaths of your garden simply to make room for new residents and the necessary accoutrements to acquire them, so you probably shouldn't get too attached to any of your piñatas. While this does somewhat hamper the sense of building and growth the game seems to want to foster, it doesn't really impede enjoyment of the game so much as shift the style of play somewhat from what might be expected.

   All in all, if you've got an Xbox 360 and are comfortable enough in your maturity to not be scared off by games packaged as kid's fare, you'll be pleased to find a game that is deep and engaging in all the right ways. If, on the other hand, you're one of those gamers who's too macho to touch anything that isn't brutally violent or horrifyingly gruesome, well by all means just go back to playing Gears of War and spending your nights weeping about your tiny, tiny pee-pee. I'm sure you'll find that very fulfilling.

       ... Mike Zeller