E308: Viva Pinata was an Xbox game?

July 20th, 2008 | Category: Nintendo DS

Okay, confession duration: I never played Viva Piñata the first instance around. The allure of festive animal husbandry was inadequate to entice me into the console purchase called for. I’ve researched the original (by, uh, watching some YouTube videos and such), but I went into my quick demo of Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise without a real preconceived notion of how Viva Piñata is supposed to look or play.

How was that ever anything but a DS game? The tasks involved in playing Viva — watering and planting plants, clearing land, building structures for critters — construct so much sense in the top-down perspective of

Pocket Paradise that it’s tough to suppose that game in a different perspective on a different system. It would be so much harder, I think, to manage a large-scale garden in a more zoomed-in view. Having a larger, wider look at the goings-on in the garden makes the game seem more natural and easier.

Gallery: Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise